Oxford announced that their 2025 word of the year is ‘rage bait.’ Which feels less like a linguistics exercise and more like a push notification you receive from a mad Redditor.
Art Credit: Aarón Blanco Tejedor
Once upon a time ‘Word of the Year’ felt anthropological. A little nerdy even. A bunch of people studying culture and language in cardigans and sensible shoes, looking at data and saying: “Huh. People sure are saying selfie a lot. Let’s write that down.”
Now it feels like any other PR-able moment. A means to drive discourse. A way to get people to argue on the internet for a full news cycle.
Pick a word that already annoys people. Build a press release around it. Wait for the outpouring of outrage.
‘Rage-bait’ really is the perfect choice because it’s doing the exact thing it describes. I mean, I felt the need to write about it. I guess I was filled with rage.
You read “Oxford selected ‘rage bait’ as their world of the year” and you feel baited. The irony is almost too clean. The institution that is supposedly reporting on language is now just…participating in the same engagement economy as everyone else.
Anger is cheap, fast, and generally shareable. It’s easier to get people to say “I hate this,” then get someone in the comments saying “Wow, this is such a quiet, thoughtful observation about how language reflects culture.”
Brands figured this out a long time ago. Now, even the institutions that catalogue words are in on the game. I guess that’s bound to happen in an economy where attention is currency.
Personally, I would have gone with Oxford’s backup “aura farming” as my word of the year, but that’s because my charisma can’t be matched.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
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