Workout
Meditation
Contact Us
Language is always evolving. “Bewildered” is now used as an antonym for its original meaning. “Woke,” which was initially intended to describe awareness of the systemic oppression of black people in America, has become a pejorative whistle for any children’s book or Marvel movie with a non-white character, or any concept that makes a person cry. Specific Canadian psychologist.
And sometimes language can change in completely involuntary but nonetheless creative ways. For example, a word intended for fans of a football team may morph into forum slang, only to become a term intended to refer to degenerate and enthusiastic chronic masturbators.
In January 2020 I chose to be an Arsenal fan. This decision came after a lifetime of watching the English Premier League and Champions League over the shoulder of my father, a veteran recreational soccer player and admirer of former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger. I wanted to have some skin in these games, not only while watching them with my dad but also with my recreational soccer teammates, several of whom are Arsenal fans.
Self-selecting into this fandom granted me perks, such as access to several (OK, three) Arsenal-focused group chats. When I went to watch a game at a bar in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, acclaimed director Spike Lee would appear in his reserved section to cheer on the club, since the pub was just around the corner from his film production company. Equally interesting benefits, of course.
Founded in 1886, Arsenal Football Club has been known as the Gunners for over a century. The team’s crest features a cannon and its first players worked in a munitions factory. The nickname makes sense when you track it down. Through linguistic evolution, Arsenal fans became known as the Gooners. According to the team, this originated from Herbert Chapman, who managed the club in the 1930s, before the club officially adopted the fan term in the 1960s. Over the following decades, “Gooner” was used to describe hooligans, especially a violent Arsenal company that adopted the name. Nowadays, it is a much tamer description used to refer to any fan of the club.
Well, it was tame, until an Internet phenomenon gave it new meaning. (For maximum effect, feel free to read the following sentences in the voice of Ice-T’s character in Law & Order: SVU.) “Gooning” is a subculture centered on devilishly prolonged bouts of masturbation. A practitioner is known as a “thug” and the place where he does it is called a “thug cave.” A 2023 Vice article dates the origins of gooning (“a prolonged edging session marked by meaninglessness, loss of control, and total surrender”) as early as 2017, though it didn’t appear to spread to the mainstream until recently. . Because of this ungodly new definition, it is now unintentionally amusing when, say, Spike Lee tells vanity fair “Your local Arsenal pub is ideal.”[i]If you want to watch a game and you are a Gooner.” Also, if fans of any team were associated with obnoxious serial idiots, wouldn’t it be the Dallas Cowboys?
The trend emerged in magazines, tabloids and advice columns, including coverage in Men’s healthhe New York Postand blackboard. “Nowadays, there are many websites, communities, subreddits, forums, and dedicated outlets designed to make bullies,” said a Mashable explainer from March 2024. “We’re all bullies here.”
We’re not all bullies here, at least not like this. This is all very unfortunate for the original Gooners, as well as anyone who is concerned about how some of humanity spends its time. But out of curiosity, I spoke with several people who knew both communities, to see how they had managed the lexical update.
Roger Feeley-Lussier, a writer and musician who lives in Massachusetts, was introduced to Arsenal by his wife. She introduced him to the club as “the Red Sox of football.” After NBC bought the rights to broadcast EPL matches in 2013, it became much easier for both of them to watch. “I was hooked from there,” Feeley-Lussier said.
The family’s support for Arsenal is serious. During their honeymoon in 2018, Feeley-Lussier and his wife visited north London to watch Arsenal defeat West Ham in a thrilling 4-1 victory, in which the Gunners scored three goals after the 80th minute. He attended exhibition games in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and took his daughters to several games.
Feeley-Lussier remembered exactly when he learned that “Gooner” no longer simply meant “Arsenal fan.” On December 18, 2021, he said, he posted a photo of his daughter and his wife on Instagram, captioning it with “my two favorite Gooners.” Then a friend sent him a direct message like “Hey, ‘Gooner’ is someone addicted to porn. Update your lingo, bro.”
“Couldn’t ‘Yankees’ also be a masturbatory term?” Feeley-Lussier asked, in a somewhat exasperated tone. There is a germ of truth there, but people don’t say “Yankees” like that. Finally, he acknowledged that the coincidence is “objectively funny,” although he did not find it surprising. (When Feeley-Lussier asked his wife if she wanted to comment, she laughed and then declined.)
Long-time Arsenal fans find the coincidence less amusing. Ryan Gaur, a London-based writer, said he was an Arsenal fan before he was born. Growing up in Birmingham, he inherited his father’s support and “was predestined to suffer supporting this club”. He could remember his father yelling “GO, GOONERS” at the television when he was a child. Last year, Gaur came across the new definition and his attitude was one of resignation: Why us??
Gaur said he now thinks twice every time he sees the term. “I want to block the part of my brain that knows its new meaning,” he told me. She has attended many Arsenal Women Football Club matches, where she has heard the crowd’s Gooner chants and can’t help but laugh. “I kinda hate being cursed with this knowledge.”
It will be an uphill battle to get the word back, Gaur predicted, but he doesn’t want to abandon the word’s history with the football club. We both shared the mission of keeping our parents blissfully unaware of other types of acts for as long as possible.
Awareness about bullies (of both types) is global. Paolo, a 24-year-old who asked me to use only his first name, is a dedicated Bukayo Saka defender from the Philippines who came to Arsenal through his unlicensed representation in a Soccer Pro Evolution video game for PlayStation 2. He was only 11 years old when he realized that this team was Arsenal and that he woke up to watch match highlights due to the time difference.
In the Philippines, basketball is a much more popular sport than soccer. Because of this, plus Dutch striker Robin van Persie leaving Arsenal for Manchester United in 2012, Paolo would not see his beloved club again until almost a decade later. Sheltering during the pandemic, he returned to Arsenal while the club was in a period of rebuilding, although the squad was packed with young talent.
“While it may not sound appealing to most, I love supporting a project that looks like it could prove the haters wrong in a few years,” Paolo told me in an email. That season, Arsenal finished in fifth place, but Paolo found that this disappointing conclusion solidified his love for the club more than at any other time in his life.
As a member of Generation Z, Paolo was innately familiar with the destructive humor of bullies and bullies. He considered that the terms are used “only by those pornography addicted communities that try to overload their videos with multiple sexual clips in a single video.” But recently, he said, “these terms have gone from sexually deviant terminology to the dominant skibidi toilet sigma slang of Generation Z.” In this sense, “brain rot” is Oxford’s word of the year in 2024.
If all of this makes a lot of sense to you, remember to get some fresh air today. Still, a search on Google Trends supports Paolo’s categorization. He said he thought the terms “gooner” and “gooning” have stuck around in part because the words sound so fun. He’s also ripe for the material. When two worlds collide: Paolo recalled when actress Anne Hathaway’s clandestine support for Arsenal was covered by the guardiana British newspaper. “Anne Hathaway is a secret Gooner and now her reinvention is complete,” the paper tweeted, causing confusion and amusement.
Since not everyone is necessarily aware of the Internet’s latest low-quality joke, Paolo theorized, it probably wouldn’t affect as many people. “It’s very non-serious, but at the same time, it’s amazing how one person’s use of language can affect another person’s life, even in very small ways,” he said. His advice to both Gooners and Gooners was to “use whatever words you want to use, even if it sounds stupid. It feels so much better to be able to say what you want (as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone), even if the world judges you for it.”
The proliferation of unpleasant references to bullies makes sense in the broader social context. As Twitter continues to deteriorate under Elon Musk’s ownership, 4chan’s language has leaked further into the public, to the detriment of everyone involved. Robert Jones, CEO and co-owner of Goonhammer, runs one of the largest websites dedicated to the popular medieval battle strategy game. war hammeralthough it also covers other games. Jones says the website, a worker collective with about 40 owners, has more than 2 million monthly readers. But the name of the site has nothing to do with Arsenal or the self-scrimmage.
“This goes back to old Internet lore,” Jones said, “and I feel like an idiot even saying those words.” The “Goon” in Goonhammer is a reference to Something Awful, an influential shitposting forum where members were referred to as “thugs”. There, the connotation was “being a hired thug, a bully, or just a blatant idiot in general,” Jones explained.
The real-life meetings of the Something Awful posters were called “thug meetings” and the projects were called “thug projects.” Goonhammer was a Goon project. The site considered a name change in 2020, but the owners decided to keep the original name as a better one was not immediately available. (Jones is not an Arsenal fan; he supports the Houston Dynamo, his local MLS team.)
“Here we are, four years later with the name ‘Goonhammer,’ and it just sucks,” Jones said.
The Online Gooner, a forum for Arsenal’s oldest fanzine, did not respond to a request for comment. The bully capsulean Arsenal podcast, also did not respond to a request for comment; He didn’t do it either. The chronicles of a bully, also an Arsenal podcast. For those who wish Stay away from all sorts of Gooners until things cool down, there are plenty of other Arsenal fan sites without misleading connotations, such as Arseblog.
