your essay asks me to condone a fallacy where you are able to say words mean a totally different thing merely by their components, and then treat that different thing as the word.
take the sentence “language isn’t just words — music is a language.” this is the sort of thing someone might nod their head to at a bar, but without the agreeableness boost of alcohol it’s clearly bullshit. there are criteria that determine if something is a language, like syntax. music is clearly not a language in the way that english is a language.
“an incel isn’t just an adult male virgin” is a “but isn’t music a language” tier sentence.
an incel is a person who is involuntarily celibate. this is what it means. a non-virgin could be an incel if they were unable to have sex, but that’s about as far as you’re going to be able to stretch the word.
I don’t think you’re unaware of what you’re doing. it’s clear that you’re trying to take something low-status (incel — a person who is so undesirable that they cannot get laid) and make it apply to something you see as high-status (ted bundy — a psychopath who is the subject of a netflix documentary). but in doing this, your priority is in how a person is received by society, not the accuracy of what you’re saying.
imagine this sentence going another way:
“a bachelor isn’t just an unmarried man. many men who identify as bachelors go out drinking with their friends. they idealize ogling the opposite sex, as a form of escape from their wives.”
this is wrong, but at the level of “well, no” in conversation.
“a president isn’t just a leader of a country or organization.”
this is wrong enough to the point where someone would think you are circulating misinformation by using ‘president’ to describe a person who is not a president of something, such as a senator.
“a doctor isn’t just a licensed medical professional.”
presuming you were referring to something health-related and not just being pedantic about what the “doctor” in “juris doctor” or “doctor of philosophy” means, this is not just wrong but harmfully wrong.
and so on, but you obviously think this is an okay-level of misinformation if it demotes ted bundy’s perceived status — not quite “a president isn’t just…”, but around the level of “a bachelor isn’t just…”
you could expand the definition to include, say, men who lost their genitals in an accident and therefore were celibate by forces of nature, but that’s not what’s going on here.
this is more than just “words don’t work that way”. it’s dishonest, it’s palpable that you’d be gratified if I also started calling ted bundy an incel, and you are asking me and other readers to be okay with that.
you clearly don’t think it’s enough to stigmatize what bundy was — a psychopath. it’s fine to say “the term ‘psychopath’ shouldn’t be cool.” perhaps your next effort should explore that concept.
ted bundy was a lot of horrible things, and it’s sufficient to call him those things.
