The Oxford word of the year has been chosen, and it’s “rage bait”. It was a close-run contest with “aura farming” – that just means charisma, for which a number of perfectly fine words already exist – and “biohack”, a non-specific lifestyle improvement in which you’ve somehow got into the mainframe of time itself, and made some aspect of your body immune to its ravages. Since “aura farming” is extraneous and “biohacks” are almost all bollocks, the competition can’t have been that close, but the neologism isn’t necessarily welcome.
Rage bait, as you probably already know, is the publication, usually online, of material designed to make people angry. It’s not a made-up phenomenon; we’ve known for some time that online engagement is most strongly driven by out-group animosity, but nor is it a cute feature of modern life, like iced matcha lattes and Labubus. It creates intellectual silos, drives deep social divisions, and ultimately corrodes trust in institutions and reason itself, as people feel so alienated from any but their own tribe that they cease to believe anything except word of mouth. I’d argue that it’s a bit like making “ethnic cleansing” your word of 1992, during the Bosnian war. Yes, people were using it a lot, but that didn’t make it a fun answer for a quiz. Turns out it was named Un-Word of the year by the GfdS (society for spoken German), which deplored its euphemistic nature. And that is fair. Anyway, good luck in the dictionary business, Oxford, if you collude to make rage bait all the rage. Your alphabetical list of meanings isn’t going to get anyone’s dander up.
