I first came across the word "cuck" in mid-2015, when a video of a speech I gave at the Oxford Union on the topic of freedom of speech and the "right to offend" received a modicum of negative attention and garnered a number of comments calling me, among other things, a cuck. At the time, I assumed it was simply some new term that the right/libertarians/4chan users/redpillers had come up with as a way to mock people who supported broadly progressive causes, much like "SJW" or "snowflake" (both of which I was also called (quite a lot)).

But the term has a more complex history and spread than that. The Wikipedia article suggests that the word is short for "cuckservative", a term of abusefor conservatives who have bought into key premises of left liberalism. The Southern Poverty Law Centre says that it is meant to "depict conservatives who don't kowtow to ultra-right political views as inept traitors to the conservative base that elected them". They argue that cuck has racist undertones, implying that compromise on immigration and multiculturalism is analogous to a white husband surrendering his white wife to a black man. They point out that cuckold pornography, which features men being aroused by the humiliation of their wives having sex with other men, often features black men specifically.

Whilst many sites claim that the origins of the word are shrouded in mystery, an article on Mel Magazine details its journey from a 12th century poem, through to Shakespeare's Othello, and then finally its appearance in the relative mainstream during GamerGate. The article goes on to argue that the word reached common parlance around July 2015, just after Donald Trump announced his candidacy, primarily drawing on data from Twitter. They note that it is commonly used on /r/The_Donald, probably the largest pro-Trump community on the web.

At the Digital Methods Initiative Summer School, we wanted to ask the question "where did the word 'cuck' come from, and can we trace its usage and spread over time?". The results, described below, I think provide flesh to the bones of the argument coming out of the one interview and Twitter data in Mel Magazine.

Who says "cuck", and why?

We are lucky enough to have access to a database of every comment ever made on Reddit. This is an incredible resource that takes a little bit of know-how and some persistence to extract data from, but it's worth persevering. I used Google's Big Query tool to query the database and retrieve all instances of the word "cuck" appearing in any comment in any subreddit, from August 2014 until May 2017.

Initially, I only looked at comments that had over 100 upvotes. The search returned ~11,000 items. I first performed a manual inspection of the first 100 returns in order to understand the broad thrust of sentiment behind them. The data suggests that there are only an extremely limited number of subreddits in which the word "cuck" is used as a serious slur. The_Donald is the primary actor here, along with associated alt-right subreddits (though exactly which subreddits these are is to be the subject offurther inquiry). In nearly all other instances, "cuck" was used ironically, or tongue-in-cheek, or as a means of deriding those who might use it seriously. This provides necessary context to the figures which follow.