SO OFFENDED THIS TITLE IS NOT CAPITALIZED!: Variation and the Social Justice Warrior
This project explores an ideological persona (Slobe 2018), the Social Justice Warrior (SJW), which mocks social justice-oriented online users. We used the Citizen Sociolinguistics method (Rymes and Leone 2014) to build an indexical field (Eckert 2008) for the SJW using comments from YouTube parody videos, of a young liberal activist who is easily offended, emotionally volatile, and vocal about their political stances online. The linguistic features most frequently mentioned were ALL CAPS and “buzzwords” (e.g. trigger, woke). We integrated these descriptions into a matched-guise perception survey where participants rated a short text which varied for the presence of ALL CAPS and “buzzwords.” Results confirm that the guises with these features were rated as significantly more emotional, easily-offended, irrational, and angry than the control text. The picture that emerges supports the view that variables, social meaning, and personae are in dialog as users make use of language as a semiotic system.
