Afriend held a controversial opinion about something, which he shared with me on WhatsApp. He insisted he wasn’t being an edgelord. A what? I took this to be a typo, a typo that happened to suit him quite well. But he claimed an edgelord was an actual thing. He defined it as a person who specialises in edgy opinions, especially if they don’t really believe them.
I checked with a few people who are more across the ways of the world than I seem to be these days: my daughters, a neighbour, an on-trend colleague or two. Blank looks all around. “Sounds dirty,” said one of my BBC colleagues. Then I asked one of my handlers at the Guardian, who not only knew the word but also failed to hide their surprise that I hadn’t. Which just goes to show that this publication is indeed at the cutting edge of things, even if some of its writers need educating.
Edgelord isn’t in my Chambers dictionary, and WhatsApp itself doesn’t recognise the word. The laptop on which I’m writing this, however, is comfortable with it, offering no squiggly red line beneath the word. The Merriam-Webster dictionary and Dictionary.com both have it, but they’re American, so are not, in my view, to be fully trusted in these matters.
I bet myself that the Oxford English Dictionary would have no truck with this nonsense – but no, here it is: “A person who affects a provocative or extreme persona, esp online.” Furthermore, the OED says the word has been about since 2013 and was “attested earliest in the context of video gaming, denoting a type of online player who customizes his or her character’s appearance, username, etc, in a manner deemed to be overly self-serious”. I’m not sure what the OED thinks it is doing spelling customises with a z, by the way, but I’ll let that pass.
Not for the first time, I feel clever and foolish at the same time. Clever for knowing what an edgelord is when others don’t; foolish for taking 12 years to join the party. As a new recruit, it ill becomes me to be picky, but surely there’s a gender issue here. I’ve come across several female edgelords in my time. What are we to call them? Not edgeladies, surely? But what else? And another thing: what’s the opposite of an edgelord? Perhaps they are thought so dull, they don’t merit a name of their own.
Now I’m seeing edgelords everywhere. I may even see one when I look in the mirror. They’re not just online, either – they’re to be found in conversations everywhere, at work and at play. Saying whatever they think it takes in order to be heard and seen, to help them feel relevant.
The edgelord community is a broad church indeed, encompassing everyone from common-or-garden bar bores to the vilest of internet trolls to the most erudite of columnists. In a society of short and shrinking attention spans, their lordships provide an essential service for all of us. We crave something different, something radical, something interesting, whether or not it’s complete bollocks. If we don’t like or believe whatever edgelordery we’re listening to, our anger makes us feel alive. If we like what we hear, we’ll repeat it in order to edgelord it over others. But if too many edgelords spout the same line, it will soon lose its edge. This means some edgelord or other will have to come up with something new. And so it goes on.
The edgelords need to be aware of something important, though: they play with fire. Because what started as an opinion they only conceived in order to shock may, like Tolkien’s ring, overwhelm them. It will become their truth, and the edgelord will turn into Gollum.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist