So many ways to be -pilled

Beyond the red and blue of "The Matrix" there's a pharmacy's worth of pill-shaped modifiers

Even a person like me who has never made it all the way through The Matrix (1999) or its countless spin-offs can’t avoid the movie’s dominant trope: red pill, blue pill:

"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." — Morpheus, The Matrix

In the decades since The Matrix’s release, “red-pilled” has taken on a cultural life of its own. As I wrote in 2017:

“Red pill” – a metaphor for “reality, however harsh” – was adopted by the men’s rights movement, many of whose adherents frequent a sub-Reddit called The Red Pill. The Red Pill was also the title of a 2016 documentary about the men’s rights movement directed by Cassie Jaye.  

Soon after I published that post, “red-pilled” expanded beyond the manosphere to become a wide-ranging metaphor, especially on the extremist right, for skepticism about “Hollywood” (often a stand-in for “Jews”) and government.¹ You might say that a red-pilled person is awake. Or even—oh, the irony—woke. Of course, woke is not the word such a person would use, because to be red-pilled, at least in the U.S. of A., is to be rightward-leaning and anti-”woke.”²

Today, however, I’m less interested in the politics of -pilled than in its linguistic powers. In short: -pilled has become a remarkably flexible suffix—a libfix³, as linguist Arnold Zwicky has dubbed such word parts—and a building block for a surprising range of adjectives in which -pilled means something like “under the influence of.” Here are some of the metaphorical pills that have caught my attention lately, with special thanks to internet pal Mike Pope for rekindling my interest in novel -pill coinages (pillages?).

Literal pills of many colors. Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash.

Colorful

Back in 2017 I devoted a Word of the Week post to blackpilling: nihilism, basically. (The designer Alexander Wang was selling a Black Pilling Shirt for $95, solid black with “light pilling throughout.”) I also noted the existence of whitepilling: “being aware of a difficult situation or position and having a fighting ‘can do’ attitude and not giving up, plus accomplishing said thing(s) within the difficult situation.”

It turns out there are many, many other pill colors. In 2019, the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) published “The Extremist Medicine Cabinet: A Guide to Online ‘Pills’,” which includes red, white, and blue, of course, and refines the definition of blackpilling: “Like their extreme right counterparts, incels [men who consider themselves “involuntarily celibate”] believe that taking the black pill means realizing that their situation is hopeless. … In a blackpilled world the sexual marketplace is governed exclusively by genetics. A man is either attractive to the opposite sex or he is not, and no amount of self-improvement can change this. This is where the incel movement takes on characteristics of a death cult.” Guys, take a chill pill, OK?

But wait, there’s more! The purple pill “is the incel version of centrism.” The pink pill “is the female version of the incel black bill.” The green pill signifies eco-fascism, “an ideology that mixes totalitarian fascism with radical environmentalism.”

Urban Dictionary, which isn’t always credible but always offers merch, also gives us clear pill, which I expected to have something to do with Scientology but instead is defined by one contributor as “the state of peace that comes with total awareness.” The word count goes on and on, and you can get the whole megillah printed on a mug for $32.95.

And thank you, UD contributors Wump7 and The Vampire Goddess, for your incompatible definitions of rainbow pilled, which may mean either “being in favor of LGBTQ+ rights” or “When you have taken the Red Pill and the Blue Pill, and now need a variety of other pills of other colours to keep up with the increasing amount of conspiracy theories arriving online.”

Yeasty

Breadpilled has the oldest historical -pilled pedigree: It’s a reference to the 1892 book The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin, “often considered a foundational text of political anarchism,” according to Wiktionary. A person who is breadpilled is probably an anarchist, or anarchist-adjacent, unless you’re referring to a breadpilled Christian, which the ADL’s Extremist Medicine Cabinet tells us means a traditional Christian. (I haven’t found an explanation. Maybe it has something to do with the Communion ritual?)

Religious-ish

“If ‘redpilled’ means seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes, ‘godpilled’ is finding a secret trap door,” writes Greta Rainbow (no relation, I think, to rainbow pilled) in a May 26, 2022, essay in The Editorial Magazine. God-pilling “is not severed from the wider culture, but rather entangled with it. It is reactionary. It is, in many cases, genuine belief.” Rainbow asks: “Do the girlies believe in Heaven because this world is living Hell?” 

Sparkly

There’s a lot of glitter at a Taylor Swift concert, and when reporter Taffy Brodesser-Akner attended one of those concerts, she told readers of the New York Times Magazine in October 2023 that she was “glitter-pilled enough to not be able to see anything but this: ‘Boyfriend’ is a song by Justin Bieber. ‘God is a woman’ is one by Ariana Grande; so is “‘my hair.’” There is such a thing as a literal glitter pill (see photo), but Brodesser-Akner’s madeupical word refers to a more existential beglittering.

DIY glitter pills

Socio-economic

Brodesser-Akner isn’t the only Times contributor making up -pilled words. In a recent Business section story (gift link—read it!) about the influence of land-tax evangelist Henry George (1839-1897), Conor Dougherty worked “George-pilled” into this paragraph:

There used to be Georgist newspapers. There are still Georgist foundations, Georgist conferences and Georgist schools. If you’ve ever played Monopoly, you have been unwittingly George-pilled: A Henry George fan invented the board game, in hopes of spreading his teachings.

And here’s one that Mike Pope forwarded to me: A.Z. Forman, a historical linguist, posted on X/Twitter that he had recently said, “I am so Ottoman-pilled that I forget the Turanians weren’t actually Turkic-speaking.” (“I think -pilled is an interesting morpheme,” he commented. It is indeed!)

Local

You can count on the style and culture Substack

Blackbird Spyplane

for nifty turns of phrase, including at least one novel -pilled. Here’s the usage in question, from the October 17, 2023, sletter⁴:

I (Jonah) am a native NYC Outerborough Boy, but I’ve spent the last 9 years getting Baypilled, so now I appreciate a dose of something natural in my eyes when I return to this beautiful f**ked-up concrete-choked city!!* [punctuation and boldface sic]

Nasty

The incel community—is it actually a community?—sure is fond of -pilled coinages. But if you really want to learn about rape pill, dog pill, and reverse dog pill, you’ll have to read the ADL’s definitions. I’m just not going to go there.

On the other hand, piss pilled, which has two (!) Urban Dictionary entries, both submitted by user Suckmytoes_77, isn’t scatological. “Taking the Piss pill means that you have chosen to live a life of ‘pissful ignorance,’ or a life where you are always pissed off and everything sucks for you,” one entry tells us. Good to know, and “pissful ignorance” is very good.

Pictogaphic

“We are beginning to think and speak like machines, in UI-friendly keywords and emoji-pilled phrases,” writes Günseli Yalcinkaya in “Blessed and Emoji-Pilled: Why Language Online Is So Absurd,” published on October 23 in the online publication Dazed. Not emoji-filled, as one might have put it, say, last year: emoji-pilled.

Update!

Somehow I’d completely missed this story by Kaitlyn Tiffany, published in The Atlantic in 2021.:

Lately, people have claimed to be pilled on Rihanna’s makeup line, on coziness as a concept, on cats sitting in gardens, on the song “Running Up That Hill,” on Kansas, on red sauce, on the country singer Hank Williams, or on the Peloton instructor Cody Rigsby. Now, pilled is an appropriate substitute for simply “suddenly becoming really into something,” in the same way that gate, in a wink to Watergate, gets attached to every scandal. It appears totally divorced from its radical roots, and is approaching the point where it means almost nothing at all.

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Seen any good -pilled coinages lately? Share them in a comment.

1. There’s a theory that the writer/directors of The Matrix, known since 2010 as Lily and Lana Wachowski, intended the red pill to be an allegory for their own gender transitions, which involved taking Premarin, a dark red pill. I am insufficiently, um, trans-pilled to comment.

2. See, for example, the website and podcast Red Pilled America—you’ll have to seek out the link yourself—which claims to tell “the tales Hollywood and the Globalist [sic] don't want you to hear,” and whose online shop sells merch like, unsurprisingly, a “Let’s Go Brandon” mug and, less predictably, a “Red Pilled Pup” dogfood dish.

3. A portmanteau of liberated and affix. Other popular libfixes include -kini (monokini, trikini, tankini) and -geddon (snowmageddon, carmageddon).

4. For more on sletter see my August 14 word of the week. For more on those asterisks, see my Strong Language post “Asterisks for the f*n of it.”