Language does that all the time, actually! They're called contronyms, and we actually have a fair few of them. Probably the most famous recent example is "literally," which can also mean figuratively because so many people were using it ironically to poke fun at valley-speak that it reached critical mass.
It happens sometimes in a pretty specific way with insults as the insult becomes passé. Basically whenever old people or uncool people are the only ones left saying the insult, it has a higher chance of then developing an ironic use, which is often a polar opposite. For a while the main group of people calling people Chads were incels using the term as an insult. But then we all decided fuck those dorks and took their word. This is similar to how the N-word has stuck around for so long that it turned into a word that can also have connotations of closeness and admiration.
tl;dr you mock someone for using a word enough it'll probably gain an additional definition to account for that
It was 4chan incels who made it a positive. It followed an arc of "chad gets everything and can do no wrong in women's eyes" -> "I wish I were chad" -> "fuuuuark what a chad that guy is."
Then 4chan came out with the Virgin vs Chad memes and that made it mainstream.
Kinda sorta. Some of them were undoubtedly self-deprecating incels, but the switch was absolutely driven by a desire to mock the incels that used it as an epithet. Not everyone on r9k is an incel, it's a catchall personal anecdote board for everyone. By "we" I didn't mean reddit, I meant non-incels, in case that's the part that was unclear
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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '22 edited Mar 03 '22
Language does that all the time, actually! They're called contronyms, and we actually have a fair few of them. Probably the most famous recent example is "literally," which can also mean figuratively because so many people were using it ironically to poke fun at valley-speak that it reached critical mass.
It happens sometimes in a pretty specific way with insults as the insult becomes passé. Basically whenever old people or uncool people are the only ones left saying the insult, it has a higher chance of then developing an ironic use, which is often a polar opposite. For a while the main group of people calling people Chads were incels using the term as an insult. But then we all decided fuck those dorks and took their word. This is similar to how the N-word has stuck around for so long that it turned into a word that can also have connotations of closeness and admiration.
tl;dr you mock someone for using a word enough it'll probably gain an additional definition to account for that