Beyond based and cringe:
Right-wing vocabulary in the 21st century

I am a descriptive linguist who is not (a) progressive. I have done previous work on vocabulary, as you’ll see below.

But what I have for you now is a one-of-a-kind list of basically every right-wing neologism or coinage (new terminology) in use in this, the Year of our Lord 2025.

• Peruse the full lexicon ☞
  (a corpus of over 300 lexemes)

• See also: Canadian Word of the Year (formerly at this address) · Antedating project I’m never going to finish · Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours: How to Feel Good About Canadian English

• And, further, Weblog postings on right-wing assholes and on linguistics generally (e.g., “How to pronounce antifa”)

Rosetta Stone manqué

Core set of terms

The canonical right-wing neologisms come in two sets. You can’t understand right-wing assholes’ podcasts, Twits, and Substacks without comprehending these terms.

1. based and cringe

2. any number of productive uses of the suffix ‑pilled, starting with redpilled/bluepilled

Based is applied to anything that opposes GAE/globohomo, i.e., the leftist/neoliberal/progressive régime. It is based to have five kids and to just refuse to engage with pajeets. Now, it’s been argued that whatever is based is “kind of a bad look,” meaning that retarded objections can be too easily levied at that which is based (in the previous examples, respectively “overpopulation”/“climate change”; “racism”).

But those objections are cringe, referring to anything that reflexively conforms to or neatly slots into the libtard régime. Pronouns in bio are cringe. So was wearing a chin diaper or getting injected with the vagine during the coof. Taking the knee for BLM or for Saint Floyd was cringe.

There is a bright line between based and cringe. But what might be based or cringe may be open to debate from time to time. Just as an example, wignats on the DR tend to have Oriental girlfriends – or sometimes wives, even then with hapa children. Based or cringe?

The ‑pilled suffix is almost as productive. Of course the source is The Matrix. That barely begins to explain the terms’ current usage. Michael Malice, The New Right (his hyphenation sic):

The mother of all New Right techniques is that of the red pill, or variants thereof like “red-pilling” or “becoming red-pilled.” The term comes directly from the film The Matrix. In the movie, everything that the vast majority of mankind sees is actually a lie, a false reality constructed for their benefit and comfort by a secret ruling cabal. Morpheus... offers Neo... a choice of two pills. “You take the blue pill,” he explains, “the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

The film’s concept is virtually identical to how red-pilling is evoked in New Right and broader Internet circles. Namely, demonstrating to someone that what is presented as fact by the corporate press and entertainment industries is only (at best) a shadow of what is real, that this supposed reality is in fact a carefully constructed narrative intentionally designed to keep some very unpleasant people in power and to keep everyone else tame and submissive.

Malice has elsewhere noted that a bluepilled person thinks his TV screen is a window. Yet “[o]ne of the problems with being red-pilled is that once one believes everything one sees as a lie, it’s often hard to navigate to truth – and in fact the more intricate and bizarre something sounds, the more intriguing its veracity becomes.” (Curiously, another book by Malice, The White Pill, barely uses that term in a commonly understood sense.)

• A redpilled person doubts the régime (“9/11 was an inside job”).
• A whitepilled person is optimistic or hopeful (“Patriots in control”); a blackpilled person has fallen prey to doomerism and is pessimistic or hopeless.
• A clearpilled person tells himself he sees things accurately without wishful thinking.

A purple-pilled person – hyphen seems mandatory there – is either a right-wing centrist (a right-liberal) or is too much of a coward to go full redpill. A purple-pilled person, for example, would like to return to the conservatism, or feminism, or transgenderism of the 1990s.

These core neological sets intersect in the near-canonical catchphrase based and redpilled. (Are those nationalists with Oriental girlfriends raced and bedpilled?)

Honourable mention:
fake and gay

It’s a single nondecomposable word (the way ice cream and New Jersey are single words each), and is an easy and pleasant way of calling something, or someone, cringe. All the right people take offence.

Affixes

The extraordinary productivity of right-wing neologisms is best seen in its proliferation of suffixes.

• ‑bux

• ‑coded

• ‑core

• ‑fag

• ‑lord

• ‑max(x)(ing)

• ‑pill(s|ed|ing) (as above)

• ‑Q

• ‑tard(ed)

• trad‑

• ‑wave

• ‑whisperer

And, in detail:

• ‑fag as productive affix dates as far back as 2011. It is one of several agentive suffixes in the right-wing lexicon. English already has a number of those, chiefly ‑er (writer, or, bizarrely, staffer) and ‑or (procrastinator). In common slang, ‑head is an agentive suffix (gearhead, crackhead) that might date to the 1850s.

  A couple of use cases explicate the sense of ‑fag. A namefag is someone who chooses not to be an anon (that’s a noun, and it can involve using a pseudonym [cf. literally means figuratively]) but to use his real name instead. A facefag (later phacephag) does likewise, as via a face-reveal.

• A troon is a tranny, but ‑troon is another agentive suffix: oldtroon (downstream from oldfag; yes, youngfag and youngtroon are used), Zoomertroon. Nouns using these suffixes are usually pluralized.

• Of course you can unite these sets: oldtroon Eurofag.

• ‑tard is never used as a “slur” (a leftist term) against persons with intellectual disabilities, mental retardation, or Down’s syndrome. Those and other special-needs minorities are held in compassionate respect by right-wing assholes, so much so that they use the term Downie affectionately. Half these guys are autists or spergs and are in no position to thrown stones anyway.

  No, this suffix denotes outright enemies (libtards), or it changes the sense of an adjective to suggest the agent should have known better or is too far gone to have known better (conspiratard, conservatard, libertardian).

  You can also call something you dislike tarded (not a suffix).

• ‑lord is barely pejorative. Edgelords enjoy shitposting online (thereby rendering them shitlords). A facefag you kind of like might now be deemed a facelord.

• ‑jak is a mildly productive suffix: Wojak/wifejak, soyjak (oft-used personas in visual memes).

• Much the same applies to ‑cuck. A word by itself, one sees it used as a suffix mainly in wagecuck, Christcuck (blasphemous, but here we are).

• ‑Q might qualify as a suffix (meaning “question”). The ur-case is the JQ for the Jewish question, but we also see the TQ (trans) and the WQ (women).

• There seem to be but two uses of ‑wave – originally Vaporwave (for the neon-pink/ice-blue illustration style redolent of the ’80s), later Tradwave (by and for tradcaths).

• ‑bux as an affix is not straightforward. À l’époque, everyone used it – though, curiously, in only three forms (Trumpbux, Bidenbux, Justinbux) that did not follow the same pattern.

  Thielbux is a current neologism, as is NEETbux. The latter carries the sense of “If all you’re going to do is call me an incel, then I’m just going to take the stipend and stay home. I’ll play my video games, work out with my kettlebells, and read classic literature on Project Gutenburg. I’m not going to bother anyone.” Thus are entire generations lost.

• ‑con is not a relevant suffix in this corpus, as it is a plainly obvious shortening of conservative and is in no respect neologistic, antedating to 1979, per OED (for neocon; paleocon dates to 1989).

Now, what about prefixes? Not many of them.

• You’d think Mythoamerica might spawn productive reuse, but it really hasn’t. Same for schizo‑, seemingly limited to schizopo(a)sting. Soyface/soyboy also seem fossilized.

• trad‑ is productively used: tradcath, tradgirl, tradwife.

Infixes? English doesn’t have many of those, and they’re all debatable. Is the morpheme “in” that is inside brother-in-law an infix? (Lots of ins there.) How about tmesis, as in abso-bloody-lutely? Probably not infixes in either case. Right-wing assholes haven’t come up with any, either.

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Colophon

This list is a successor to the list of right‑ and left-wing vocabulary that I had submitted for a revision to CP Caps and Spelling in 2018. Were one to merge and dedupe these lists, I have amassed about 450 vocabulary items.

“In-group preference”

Now: Given that I am a mere linguist and not a real lexicographer, one of whom I actually know, how did I choose what to include and exclude?

• Top of the decision three is “Have I seen or heard it?”

• Next is “Has it caught on, for some sense of the term?” (As I write this in 2025, the neologism Panican [n.; someone who panics and fails to trust the plan] has not caught on and isn’t included.)

• “Does this coinage refer to something that has not come into existence yet?” That has actually happened, as with wardriving circa 2001: Nobody actually drove around town looking for open wifi networks.

• Of some relevance is “If I don’t include it in this list, will people forget about it?” While Urban Dictionary and a few other sources document a couple of these terms here and there, what I have assembled may be the only list.

• And, last but not least, no matter how distasteful I do or do not find a word or phrase, as a descriptive linguist my bias is toward inclusion. (But not diversity and equity.) I say this even though I am also a severe technical editor, an amalgam I insist is not contradictory.

Slang can be evanescent or it can be assimilated into everyday language. Don’t be too concerned about the former case; I’m not. Those who know what a high-and-tight or hi-’n’-tite haircut is (mainstream terms) probably don’t know that hairstyle used to be called a heinie (slang term). Language change is the norm; indeed, languages change.

There is no bright line separating vocabulary items to include versus exclude. Relevance resides on a cline.

This lexicon is unknown to shitlibs…

Indeed, looking at the last neologism above, a leftist term of opprobrium would be MAGAts. Rhymes with “faggots,” a word they cannot bring themselves to utter.

While normies may have heard of such lexemes as MAGA, essentially every term in this lexicon is completely unknown to normies and everyone to the left of them – all the way down to based and cringe. In part this is due to libtards’ unwillingness to conceive of certain morphemes (e.g., troon, which can also be a suffix; retard). What you cannot bear to conceive you cannot bring yourself to say or write.

(There actually are barely any books or articles that include the word normie in their titles; Kill All Normies stands almost alone. Nonetheless, even normies know the word normie, which antedates to 1950.)

Another right-wing term that normies will know is woke. But like telling a gay man he isn’t gay, he’s just experiencing same-sex attraction, the sense and intent behind right‑ and left-wing usages of woke are worlds apart, and a normie will never use that term to describe himself (even if he’s gay).

Fact-checking my ass

In another wrinkle, some terms that seem new to the dissident right are well established and materially unchanged in sense.

• Psyop dates from 1965 (it really isn’t hyphenated).

• Client groups dates from 1919.

• Contrariwise, kulaks (1877!) are chuds in the current sense – vulgarly disposable MAGApedes.

• Snowflake? In this sense, coined by Palahniuk in Fight Club in 1996. (You are not a special snowflake. You are a normalfag at best.)

• Midwit and underminer are further examples, the latter being the title of a wry novel by homosexualist author Mike Albo from now 20 years ago.

• Generation Z is in the OED while Zoomer is not, but the latter has currency in the lamestream media.

I looked at the Canadian Business and Current Affairs database of newspapers, magazines, and transcripts of régime media. I was trying to disprove my contention that *pilled constructs are completely unknown to régime apparatchiks.

With exceptions around the edges, they are.

• Shitlibs are so in the dark about blackpilling that a recent book review of Adam Aleksic’s Algospeak put that term in quotation marks. (Rachel S. Hunt, Canadian Press [yes, CP]: “How much has social media changed the way we talk and behave? [...] If you already know what words like... ‘blackpilled’ mean, some of this information might not come as a surprise to you.”)

  A CBC Radio segment from May 2025 gets the sense entirely wrong.

• Bluepilled appears in shitlib media precisely never, redpilled only in a couple of direct quotes.

• A few other core lexemes that never come up: fake and gay; based and cringe in these direct senses; globohomo; soyboy. Great Replacement (Theory [caps sic]) they take seriously enough to deboonk.

• Some right‑/left-wing terminology has ambiguous crossover. Of interest is hypernormalization, coined by a Russian avant-garde impresario and vulgarized by Adam Curtis’s documentary of the same title (viz Hypernormalisation).

  No cringe progressive would concede we are living under hypernormalization in current era; only based opponents of the régime are clearpilled enough to recognize that truth.

• Some right-wing vocabulary is occasionally misdefined by régime media – chad, for example. The result is that liberals know the word but get it wrong.

...but shitlibs are great at coining phrases

What progressives are good at is coining entire phrases that shake up Anglosphere societies. They produce barely any of these catchphrases, but, boy, do they spread like wildfire.

• Hands up, don’t shoot!

• gender-affirming care

• truth and reconciliation

• Black Lives Matter

Everyone has heard these phrases. In fact, most people could finish them off if you showed them cue cards containing only the first couple of words.

Liberals are quite shit at neologizing. Truthiness (OED: 2005) and deplorables had good runs each, and non-progressives began ironically reusing the latter (Deplorable Nation). Assault rifle in the sense used by Democrats dates only to 2018. Yet the malapropism cheap fakes is emblematic of the best they can manage. (The term of art is deepfake, but there was interference from “cheat.”)

Meanwhile, right-wing assholes are quite shit at coining world-changing catchphrases. (I have elsewhere described Auron MacIntyre as “a handsome aphorist.” Aphorisms are not catchphrases.) But that is to be expected, as the left wing, and everyone who isn’t in it, have long since speciated into irreconcilable factions. To their credit, though, the based contingent is an order of magnitude more productive (again: some 450 coinages here).

What a difference a couple of generations make

Just as the north and south magnetic poles might swap places every few millennia, a long time ago it was progressives who were adept at coinages – none more prominently than near-insufferable gayfag Douglas Coupland, whom I described as adept at “glib throwaway folk etymology (Vancouver condos are see-throughs).”

The value proposition of Generation X was its sidenoted neologisms, half of them with custom illos. Coupland, a drunk whose boyfriend left him, has thrown it all away, not least by misnaming the immediately-previous cohort as Generation C (for coronavirus SARS-CoV‑2). Yet his 2021 coinage high-network-worth individuals is a keeper.

I did say the poles swapped places. Republicans (Michael Moore: “the Republicrats”) were comically inept at neologizing in the warblogger era. French fries as freedom fries (why not liberty cabbage for sauerkraut?)... suicide bombers as homicide bombers. Risible on a good day.

Sarah Palin’s use of lamestream, however, brought it back to life. Doonesbury quoted her, and the OED antedates it to 1995. Also a keeper.

(Deep state? 1997. Drain the swamp? Ronald Reagan, 1982.)

SARS-CoV‑2

History repeated itself during the scamdemic of the Wu flu: Right-wing assholes came up with nearly a dozen euphemisms to evade censorship by troons at Twitter and Facebook, while progressives, and right-liberals in government office, flooded the zone with society-altering catchphrases (we’re all in this together; two weeks to stop the spread).

Herein, I categorize right-wing lexemes under the neutral heading SARS-CoV‑2.

(For reference, social distancing in directly applicable senses antedates to 2004.)

‑bux nixed

I have changed my mind on this one ↑

Not the Austrian Painter Starter Kit

I am not including a set of coinages that are well-attested by our enemies, as by government-funded soi-disant anti-hate groups and equally-government-funded anti-hate researchers.

• Anyone who has read coverage in the régime media of far-right groups will be familiar with this set of terms. The core lexeme here is incel; every shitlib tells herself she knows what one of those is. Maybe incels shouldn’t quite be genocided off the face of the earth, she thinks, but they’re a problem, obviously. (Aren’t they?)

  A number of terms associated with neo-Nazis, a subculture that exists only in Nordic countries (cf. Stieg Larsson), are also familiar.

  • 88 means HH means “Heil Hitler.”

  • The 14 words are “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children,” as even Old Farmer’s Wikipedia will tell you.

  • Such lexemes can be productively combined (1488).

  As with neocon/paleocon, these slang terms are decades old and are not neologisms. Really, their only use today is in memes that riff on American History X. And you’ll never find a libtard who poasts an image macro like that.

• Interestingly enough, almost all the new vocabulary from QAnon is so well established that those ‑logisms are no longer neo‑ (or Morpheo‑). Words travel fast.

Still to come

I will continue to pick away at the corpus and this elucidation over time. Of interest are coinages from individual right-wing personalities, usage of which immediately brings the relevant personality to mind: how this make u feel? evokes BAP.

One more time

Full lexicon ☞

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Posted: 2025.08.25 ¶ Updated: 2025.08.27