Pilled-maxxing
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A couple of relatively recent English compounding forms are getting more common in the media: X-pilled and X-maxxing.
"Red-pilled culture is corroding young men’s brains"
"This mom ‘de-pilled’ her teen son. What is that and why are people praising her?"
"Are you pope-pilled? Here's your guide to the 2025 Conclave."
"California Democrats get ‘abundance-pilled’ as they look for a path forward"
"Are Q-Pilled Family Members Lost for Good?"
"“Sleepmaxxing” Is Trending—I’d Caution Against It"
"Happy hour-maxxing: An Old Port bar crawl that gets you more for less"
"OPINION: Stop the protein maxxing, start eating what you want"
"What is the aura maxxing ? The tik tok trend explained"
"WTF Is ‘Fertility Maxxing’? Why It’s Gaining Attention Among People Trying to Get Pregnant"
It's pretty obvious what these mean. The etymology of maxxing is clear, though the double x is an innovation, and the cultural history of the idiom needs exploring — it hasn't made it into Wiktionary yet, much less the OED.
Most people will guess that the pilled forms come from the 1999 movie The Matrix, where Neo is given a choice between red (real world) and blue (Matrix) pills.
The pills in The Matrix may have been based on an earlier usage, in Ronald Howard's 1980 paper "On making life and death decisions", which features a hypothetic choice between a white pill and a black pill , the latter being described by Wiktionary as "A hypothetical pill with a specific probability of causing death, which one is offered a large sum of money in order to take, as a philosophical dilemma." But then black pill was re-invented post-Matrix, with a sense Wiktionary glosses as "A notional pill taken by those who have adopted a nihilistic, usually (but not necessarily) far-right philosophy, especially incels who believe unattractive men will never be sexually or romantically successful."
Update — Randy Hudson in the comments points out another source of pill-pilling:
The Wikipedia article "Red pill and blue pill" points out that the [1990] film "Total Recall" has a scene where the hero is asked to swallow a red pill to symbolize his desire to return to reality.
And bks reminds us of the 1967 song "White Rabbit":
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall
Update #2 — I meant to include this couplet from Jesse Welles' song "Red":
I got me some red pills in a bottle, I got black and blue ones too.
All the pills are all the same, the illusion is you choose.
bks said,
May 24, 2025 @ 6:57 am
And the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all.
Laura Morland said,
May 24, 2025 @ 7:16 am
@ bks, Thanks for the chuckle!
I find it hard to believe that the X-pilled phenomenon could derive from an academic paper (in a "General Motors" series, no less).
My money is on The Matrix, which itself may have been inspired (as bks perhaps implies), by the Jefferson Airplane song, Go Ask Alice (1967).
What do the ngram results reveal?
Philip Taylor said,
May 24, 2025 @ 7:38 am
"Most people will guess that the pilled forms come from the 1999 movie The Matrix" — I would respectfully challenge "most". "Some" would seem more appropriate to me. I am familiar with the film title The Matrix, may have watched it, but have zero recollection of anything about it. This is not indicative of a personal blind-spot when it comes to films, as I can recall a great deal about (e.g.,) The Wicker Man, which pre-dates The Matrix by some 25 years …
Adam said,
May 24, 2025 @ 7:40 am
Interesting, Laura. I had never heard of or thought of connection to Jefferson Airplane. (Though the song where the line “Go ask Alice” appears is “White Rabbit.”)
Randy Hudson said,
May 24, 2025 @ 8:14 am
The Wikipedia article "Red pill and blue pill" points out that the film "Total Recall" has a scene where the hero is asked to swallow a red pill to symbolize his desire to return to reality.
Keith Ivey said,
May 24, 2025 @ 8:29 am
Double x is also often seen in "doxxing" and "antivaxx". I don't understand why. English didn't use to use double x (maybe until Exxon came along). What's wrong with "doxing" and "antivax"?
Robert Coren said,
May 24, 2025 @ 9:06 am
Maybe I'm just having a dense day, but I find myself none the wiser as to what these "-pilled" expressions actually mean.
Mark Liberman said,
May 24, 2025 @ 9:28 am
@Robert Coren: "Maybe I'm just having a dense day, but I find myself none the wiser as to what these "-pilled" expressions actually mean."
From a 2021 Atlantic article, cited in the Wiktionary entry:
-pilled was ironically co-opted from the alt-right to connote a sort of forced subscription to an ideology. To be X-pilled meant to learn new information that made you an enthusiastic lover of X. The serious sense of “waking up to the truth” that alt-righters used redpilling to mean was weathered down with irony until it revealed what may be the true meaning of the term: to become a superfan of something, political or otherwise.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 24, 2025 @ 9:47 am
While doubled consonants in current English orthography do not usually represent gemination in current English phonology, I agree with Keith Ivey that the doubled-x is innovative and kind of weird. Maybe because "x" represents a cluster and doubling it somehow implies /ksks/, which is not possible in English phonotactics and I suspect likewise in the phonotactics of many other languages.
OTOH, John Elroy Sanford (1922-91) was using the stage name "Redd Foxx" at least as early as 1946. But maybe that had the same motivation (visual distinctiveness for its own sake) as the later "Exxon"?
Nancy Friedman said,
May 24, 2025 @ 9:54 am
A couple more that caught my eye recently:
Birdpilled: https://slate.com/culture/2025/05/birds-movies-charlies-angels-2000-pygmy-nuthatch.html "Bird-watching does sometimes involve just that—watching birds—but for the truly birdpilled, it’s about tuning in to a new layer of reality around you and decoding it."
Looksmaxxing: Enhancing one's (male) appearance, often through extreme measures such as jaw surgery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looksmaxxing
I wrote about "-pilled" in 2023, but without the Total Recall or White Rabbit references: https://fritinancy.substack.com/p/so-many-ways-to-be-pilled
Matt T. said,
May 24, 2025 @ 10:12 am
I always assumed that "doxxing" was the result of jokily applying the twinning rule that gives "hitting" and "flubbing" to the innovative verb "dox". (The fact that the rule isn't usually applied to verbs ending in x, e.g. taxing not *taxing, being the jokey part. Sort of like insisting on the plural "boxen" instead of "boxes".)
Matt T. said,
May 24, 2025 @ 10:13 am
(er, *taxxing)
Jonathan Smith said,
May 24, 2025 @ 10:41 am
Interesting that in the cited headlines, 3/6 "X-pilled" and 2/6 "X-maxxing" terms are in quotes — calling these "scare quotes" is not quite right but it's a related usage kinda meaning "or so they are saying nowadays, myself I'm reluctant to imply it's legit." Reminds me of seeing Chuck Berry announce Maybellene as a "fairly nice 'hit'" (Belgium TV 1965) with the quotes intonational in nature… i.e. this usage of "hit" was novel-ish at the time.
Jason M said,
May 24, 2025 @ 2:03 pm
As others said, I assumed the pilling is via X/Twitter and other social where swallowing the pill is akin to drinking the Kool-Aid, the former being a Matrix referent, the latter a Jonestown one. The Matrix, in turn, came from Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane, born from San Francisco 60s psychedelian interest in movements and mind-altering, all ultimately from Lewis Carroll.
Maxxing may be modeled on doxxing spelling, a jokey, slangy way of double consonanting to indicate a preceding short vowel, i.e., with the double “x”, you are not tempted to pronounce it “mAYksing”. Of course, as per @Matt T. nobody is tempted to say bOHksing….or may be it’s influenced by factory irregular, discount department store T.J. Maxx ;-)
Joe said,
May 24, 2025 @ 2:48 pm
The website Know Your Meme is a great source for the origins of internet slang, though the article on "-pilled" is a bit of a stub:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/maxxing
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pilled
It's important to understand that in places like Slate, Bluesky, and formerly Twitter, a lot of internet slang like this is used quasi-ironically. The implication is "there is a community of weirdos who use this term unironically for serious issues like misogyny, and you and I are Extremely Online enough to be aware of them, so it's funny when I use the same jargon for something mundane like sleep or esoteric like AGI…"
AntC said,
May 24, 2025 @ 3:08 pm
J.W. Brewer said,
May 24, 2025 @ 3:22 pm
@AntC: there are no pills in Lewis Carroll's text. The "actual origin" that is relevant in context is thus the circa 1966* updating of Carroll's story to reflect changes in pharmaceutical-delivery technology.
*The hit version everyone in myl's generation of Americans (and several subsequent ones) knows was recorded and released in 1967, but when the Jefferson Airplane hired Grace Slick in Oct. '66 to replace their original female singer, this was one of the songs she brought with her from the repertoire of her prior band the Great Society. A somewhat rough version of the GS doing the song live in '66 was subsequently released in '68 on an album intended to cash in on the success of their alumna – it's a long version which has over four minutes of pseudo-Indic instrumental noodling before the vocals start. As chance would have it, it was (or was at least marketed as) a performance recorded live at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix_(club). I don't know of any direct connection between the name of that performance venue and the decades-later film (or "American cyberpunk media franchise," to quote wikipedia) of the same name, but maybe there's something I d on't know.
Matt McIrvin said,
May 24, 2025 @ 8:23 pm
I remember thinking the scene in The Matrix was extremely reminiscent of the one in Total Recall. But it seems to have had a much greater effect on the culture. The whole Phil Dick-derived "what is reality?" angle of the Arnie movie was overshadowed by its violence and surreal imagery, but somehow in The Matrix it sank in.
Steve Morrison said,
May 24, 2025 @ 8:25 pm
There’s also the computer language Rexx.
Matt McIrvin said,
May 24, 2025 @ 8:29 pm
As for the name "The Matrix" itself, it probably comes from William Gibson's use of the term as a synonym for "cyberspace", and he probably got it from "Doctor Who", where it was used to mean the illusionary world projected by the Time Lords' supercomputer.
FJ said,
May 25, 2025 @ 1:45 am
In 2022, I noticed people had started using 'to pill' as a transitive verb, as in:
Can someone pill me on X?
Meaning can someone give me the low-down on X.
Philip Anderson said,
May 25, 2025 @ 4:54 am
Like Jason M, I interpret the -xx- as applying the short-vowel convention, influenced by the normalisation of -xx- in trademark and stage names.
When we do have a long vowel before an -x, we have to indicate this differently, e.g. hoaxing and coaxing (versus coxing).
M. Paul Shore said,
May 25, 2025 @ 11:16 am
Jonathan Smith: Note that the use of "hit" to mean "a work of art (in the broad sense) enjoying significant popular success" is in fact not a recent development, but goes at least as far back as the early nineteenth century; see the word's OED entry, which includes numerous examples.
Roberts Brothers, Louisa May Alcott's publisher, referred to Little Women in an announcement not long after that novel's 1868 publication as "[t]he great literary hit of the season".
Philip Taylor said,
May 25, 2025 @ 12:16 pm
"When we do have a long vowel before an -x, we have to indicate this differently, e.g. hoaxing and coaxing (versus coxing)" — and, interestingly, also when there is not an -x but a -ks : Boakes, Broackes, Ffolkes, Fowkes, Noakes, Oakes, Oaks, with the sole apparent exception being Stokes.
Kris said,
May 27, 2025 @ 5:00 pm
Your comment is confusing to me, Philip, as most of your examples are -kes, which is exactly how you would typically expect to make the vowel long before that ending.
Bloke, toke, spoke, smoke, joke, choke, yoke, coke, poke, etc. (all of which can end with s). Did you mean only for proper nouns? Even in that case I think there's probably more exceptions than Stokes, but perhaps it is closer to being a rule there.
I'm surprised more (Americans at least) aren't remembering that Foxx is a legitimate last name, since Jimmie Foxx is one of the most famous baseball players of all time.
Philip Taylor said,
May 28, 2025 @ 1:56 am
You are quite correctr, Kris, and I can only blame my increasingly senile what-once-passed-for-a-brain. Sincere apologies.