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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1074 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 8, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What are your favourite inherently funny words?

Almost all incel slang makes me laugh, owing to the incongruity between how silly it sounds and the deadly seriousness with which members of the community use it. Clavicular, sounding like he's on the brink of tears, spitting out "I am not your JESTER!"? Hilarious. It is utterly beyond me how anyone can use the phrase "cock carousel" with a straight face: how can you say it and not picture a literal carousel, but with all of the plastic horses replaced with gargantuan plastic penises? Basically any portmanteau ending with "-maxx" ("looksmaxx", "moneymaxx", "lethalitymaxx") will make me laugh regardless of context. Their terms for assorted sub-categories of incel ("currycel" for desi incels, "ricecel" for Asian incels) are delightful, and inevitably invite the creation of neologisms ("potatocel" for incels of Hibernian extraction; a Turkish friend proposed "kebabcel").

But the incels' crowning achievement in unintentional (?) hilarity is the abbreviated form of their term for a disfavoured woman, "femoid". The word "femoid" is not particularly funny, and doesn't scan: neither "FEE-moyd" nor "FEM-oyd" really sound satisfying to say, and tend to break the rhythm of the sentence in which they are spoken. Perhaps in recognition of this, some incels abbreviated the word and produced a linguistic masterpiece: foid.

Foid. Foid. Fooooyyd. Foid! FOID.

Utterly marvelous. Pretty much any tweet that uses it will have me laughing, regardless of context. Sometimes these will be clever plays on words (e.g. someone discovered that the First Lady of New York had drawn a comic depicting herself lying on the ground with a police officer kneeling on her back, to which someone quipped "Finally – George Foid"), but they needn't be: simply using it in a completely unrelated context is a reliable recipe for hilarity. It's one of the purest invocations of the WHEEZE meme I've seen in years.

But I want to emphasise: I don't find this word funny because of what it means. "Foid" is funny in a way that "bitch", "whore", "slut", "cunt"* etc. are not, despite being roughly synonymous. It's an inherently funny word: it just sounds funny, completely independent of its meaning.

What are some other examples of inherently funny words?

*Wikipedia has a category page called "Pejorative terms for women", and the first listed example is "adult human female". Uhh, sure thing guys.

Also I'd argue kyōiku mama is not particularly derogatory but descriptive. Kyōiku simply means education. There are other terms like onibaba that refer to more fierce and literally demon-hags that nag their children about xyz. A woman might even describe herself as a kyōiku mama though no woman would describe herself as onibaba.

But this may have been added by a Japanese person with a different view.

edit: A lesbian friend of mine once said the term woman was often meant derogatorily. As in "That woman said..." This was only a few years after Bill Clinton's denials about sexual relations with Monica, so maybe that's what she was thinking of. I didn't ask what term she'd prefer.

Well, you know, most of the feminine pronouns do have mocking but not necessarily misogynistic undertones.

I think Brave Story uses the term ijiwaru baba when MC's mother is forbidding him to see his beloved uncle, with whom she has a vendetta.

A lesbian friend of mine once said the term woman was often meant derogatorily. As in "That woman said..."

I think there's something to this, though I would say that "often" is overstating it. People will sometimes use "woman" as a form of address or even an interjection of frustration ("women!"), which does carry a hint of derogation. Of course, the word "man" sometimes gets used by women in the same way, so it's not a one way phenomenon.

Prefer "men of wo"?

kyōiku mama sounds like the Japanese equivalent of "tiger mom".

Probably, though associated mostly with a mom who closely curates schoolwork, what schools to apply for, study time, juku or cram schools, etc. I understand the Amy Chua version as much more all-encompassing (i.e. never allow your child unstructured free time, period.)

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