2,849
edits
"Incel" etymology: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
→Accuracy
No edit summary |
|||
| Line 18: | Line 18: | ||
==="Involuntary"=== | ==="Involuntary"=== | ||
Finally, the word "involuntary" in "involuntary celibacy" makes it somewhat of an umbrella term. The adjective "involuntary" is intentionally broad enough that it includes individuals from a broad spectrum of emotional or subjective experiences, including those who are angry about their situation, as well as those who are content with their situation. Although the terms "nonvolitional" and "unintentional" have identical meanings to "involuntary", the former two have the disadvantage of having the prefixes "non-" and "un-" that makes them intractably associated with a determinative rather than the intention of the coinage as a noun. | Finally, the word "involuntary" in "involuntary celibacy" makes it somewhat of an umbrella term. The adjective "involuntary" is intentionally broad enough that it includes individuals from a broad spectrum of emotional or subjective experiences, including those who are angry about their situation, as well as those who are content with their situation. Although the terms "nonvolitional" and "unintentional" have identical meanings to "involuntary", the former two have the disadvantage of having the prefixes "non-" and "un-" that makes them intractably associated with a determinative rather than the intention of the coinage as a noun. | ||
==Polyseme== | |||
The most common criticism of the term "incel" is the suggestion that it is a misnomer. These critics argue that it is a misnomer because "celibacy" is by definition voluntary. The counter-argument to this criticism is that words can have multiple senses. Although it is true that "celibacy" usually refers to a voluntary (or volitional) act, lexical semantic fields such as homonyms and polysemes prove that a single word can have multiple meanings. The former refers to words with the same spelling but unrelated meanings, the latter to same spellings with similar meanings. The term "incel" is derived from the non-volitional sense of "celibacy". | |||
As such, the term incel is a hyponym of a polyseme of the most common usage of the term celibacy. | |||
==See also== | ==See also== | ||