User:ItalianRake/SJW

Social Justice Warrior, commonly abbreviated as SJW, is a pejorative term for a person expressing or promoting socially progressive views, particularly relating to social liberalism, political correctness or feminism. The accusation of being an SJW implies that a person is engaging in putatively disingenuous social justice arguments or activism to raise their personal reputation. In internet and video game culture the phrase is broadly associated with the Gamergate controversy and wider culture war fallout, including the 2015 Sad Puppies campaign that impacted the Hugo Awards.

There have been some attempts to rehabilitate and reclaim the phrase as a positive aspect of social justice activism.

Origin and meaning
In August 2015, the derogatory noun Social Justice Warrior was included in the latest batch of words added to Oxford Dictionaries. Abby Ohlheiser wrote in The Washington Post that the term "social-justice warrior" or variations thereof had been used as a positive phrase in the past, and provided an example dating to 1991. She quoted Katherine Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press, who said, “All of the examples I’ve seen until quite recently are lionizing the person”. Olheiser wrote that the negatively charged phrase had "emerged as the preferred term among the Gamergate movement for the people they believed to be their greatest enemies." In discussing the term's origin, Martin outlined the similarity with the negative use of "political correctness" to denigrate something, stating that “the perceived orthodoxy [of progressive politics] has prompted a backlash among people who feel their speech is being policed.”