Whatever your feelings on that philosophy, the use of “maxxing” as a suffix assumed to be familiar or at least intelligible to most readers of a mainstream news outlet is evidence of another trend: the assimilation of incel terminology across the broader internet. The online ecosystem of incels, or “involuntarily celibate” men, is saturated with this sort of clinical jargon; its aggrieved participants insulate, isolate, and identify themselves through in-group codespeak that is meant to baffle and repel outsiders. So how did non-incels (“normies,” as incels would label them) end up adopting and recontextualizing these loaded words?