Scott Selisker writes in New Literary History that the SJW is often criticised as the 'stereotype of the feminist as unreasonable, sanctimonious, biased, and self-aggrandizing'. The negative connotation has primarily been aimed at those espousing views adhering to social progressivism, cultural inclusivity, or feminism. According to Know Your Meme, the pejorative term ' keyboard warrior', which describes a person who is unreasonably angry and hides behind their keyboard, may be a precursor to the 'social justice warrior'.
The term first appeared on Urban Dictionary in 2011 and on the Something Awful forums in 2013. Pejorative meaningĪccording to Martin, the term switched from primarily positive to negative around 2011, when it was first used as an insult on Twitter. Merriam-Webster dates the earliest use of the term to 1945. As of 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary had not done a full search for the earliest usage. dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said in 2015 that 'll of the examples I've seen until quite recently are lionizing the person'. From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, social-justice warrior was used as a neutral or complimentary phrase, as when a 1991 Montreal Gazette article describes union activist Michel Chartrand as a 'Quebec nationalist and social-justice warrior'.
Dating back to 1824, the term social justice refers to justice on a societal level.
