Today’s new-to-me term might not be that useful, but the construction amused me. Let’s start backwards, with the description. You’re following a social-media thread and there’s a guy who keeps asking questions or making comments that skirt the edge or sexism or misogyny but aren’t overtly so. (Example: “Why are sexist memes/comments against men okay?”) The guy is seeking attention and trying to harass women or minorities, but he feels that he has plausible deniability: “I’m trying to start a conversation!”
In an article on the Mel site, Miles Klee gave these guys a name: Devil’s chadvocate. They act as if they’re taking a contrary stance in order to stimulate debate, but they’re really just being jerks. Being a Devil’s chadvocate is related to sealioning, or “pestering a target with unsolicited questions delivered with a false air of civility,” as Nancy Friedman defined it. Which is itself a subspecies of troll. But as I read it, a Devil’s chadvocate is more specific to harassing certain classes of people.
Obviously, this is a play on devil’s advocate. I thought for a bit about the use of chad in chadvocate, because there is a term Chad. This name/word is prevalent in the incel community (apparently) to refer to “alpha male” types who, in the incels’ view, unfairly get all the girls. I thought that perhaps chad here might have some sort of relationship to the quickly evolving definition of a Karen; for example, maybe Chad is a known term for a sealioning type of person? Or just for a jerk. But I’m not finding any evidence of that, so I have to conclude that Klee used chad primarily because it rhymes with the ad of advocate. Still, good term, though obviously intended as an insult.
Which leads neatly to a question: what’s the origin of insult? We got it from French, but it goes back almost directly to Latin insultare. This meant two things: metaphorically, it meant the same as insult: “To assail with offensively dishonouring or contemptuous speech or action.” (I love the definitions in the OED.) But more literally, it meant to “jump” (salire) “on” (in); to insult someone was to jump on them. (If you know Spanish, you might recognize the relationship to the verb saltar, also “to jump.”)
Do we see that -sult part for “to jump” anywhere else in English? Yes we do. One relative is the word assault, which was Latin ad- (“at”) and saltare again (“to jump”), but this time literally. In fact, we still use jump to mean “assaulted” as in “They jumped him in the alley.” Other related terms are somersault (from Latin “leap over”), exult (“leap up”), possibly salmon (a leaping fish), and salient in various older senses.
Update: On Twitter, Edward Bannat notes that sally as in sally forth is another word derived from “jump.”
And speaking of leaping, I should probably leap into some work today.
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