Oxford University Press, publisher of that great bastion of humane learning, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), has chosen its 2025 Word of the Year. It’s (or, should I say, they are?) “rage bait”.
In an attempt to sidestep accusations of recursive rage baiting – on account of plausible reactions to “rage bait” being two words rather than one – the editor was quick to offer clarification. Though “rage bait” is a compound of the well-known words, “rage” and “bait”, “rage bait” is itself a distinctive stand-alone semantic unit and thus a valid Word of the Year winner. Phew.
The OED definition is given as “(n.) Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.” Basically, rage bait describes the calculated instrumentalisation of anger, especially as it serves online commerce via engagement.
The OED started awarding a Word of the Year in 2004, choosing “chav” as the first honoree. The subsequent picks have tended to follow somewhat in chav’s footsteps. They’re often slang-words, tend to be zeitgeist-tracking, and usually indicate some learned insight on changing features of the social world over the year.
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In 2016, “post-truth” highlighted the consequences of the increasingly fragmented global media landscape, especially following the American election that saw Trump secure his first presidential term. In 2021, “vax” emphasised a newly contentious gloss on a part of medical science that had previously been regarded more uniformly positively, except in certain narrow circles. In 2023, “rizz” (a popular online contraction of “charisma”) became emblematic of the hazy, aura-driven concepts that seemed (to bemused outsiders, at least) to define Gen Z’s framing of almost everything.
So, was 2025 an angry year? Are we in an age of rage, and if so, should we be worried?
Back in 2017, before her collection of essays The Right to Sex propelled her into her position as a leading public intellectual of the day, philosopher Amia Srinivasan published a rage-related article in the Journal of Political Philosophy. In The Aptness of Anger, Srinivasan set the scene with a famous 1965 debate in the Cambridge Union between acclaimed author and civil rights activist James Baldwin and editor in chief of The National Review, William F Buckley. The most important public intellectuals in the civil rights movement and the American conservative movement debated the motion “The American dream has been achieved at the expense of the American Negro”.
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In a compelling opening, Baldwin perfectly summed up the cruel racial legacy behind the “American dream”, saying “I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: that I picked the cotton, and I carried to market, and I built the railroads, under someone else’s whip, for nothing ... for nothing. The southern oligarchy which has until today so much power in Washington ... was created by my labour and my sweat, and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And no one can challenge that statement. It is a matter of historical record.”
Buckley responded with pragmatics: “What in fact shall we do about it? What shall we in America try to do (…) to eliminate those psychic humiliations which I join Mr Baldwin in believing are the very worst aspects of this discrimination?” In doing so, he conveys the idea that righteous anger like Baldwin’s must always be swept away by prudential reasons to get over it. You are angry, but what good does it do? Anger, he suggests, is counterproductive.
But anger is also appropriate. This year, we witnessed violence and atrocities the world over that could never be summarised. The horrors of genocidal violence in Gaza and Sudan provided new levels of live detail of unthinkable intergenerational suffering. Another year of widespread failure to steer the ship into better waters on environmental issues makes it easy to feel we are inhabitants of a planet that is being stolen from us and burned beneath us. In the US, ICE agents round up immigrants as the president and everyone in his egregious orbit pursue their own enrichment and he tells a woman reporter to “quiet, piggy”. Centrist politicians in Europe try to recover ground from the far right by demonising migrants.
Locally, homelessness soars and children with the greatest needs struggle for school places and proper supports. Daily court reports depict the relentless toll of gender-based violence. The 16th deadline for the national children’s hospital comes and goes. It is a year in which it is apt to be angry.
Part of Srinivasan’s message in The Aptness of Anger is that we should be suspicious of those who chastise a kind of non-fungibility in genuine political emotion. Rational politics should acknowledge a role for a feeling response to the facts of our political realities, anger included. Rage should motivate us to action.
But I wonder whether the kind of rage that features in the current moment hasn’t lost a lot of its power. Moving from the OED back to Johnson’s 18th century version, we find rage distilled down to “violent anger; vehement fury”, emphasising that conceptual relationship between passion and action (and also explaining the enthusiastic sense of rage we get in phrases like “it was all the rage”).
I don’t know whether it’s the scale of the horrors, but there is a danger that our modern form of rage becomes impotent, baited by a technology and media environment that benefits from our inactivity. Social media, especially, encourages a kind of role-playing of rage that for too many of us terminates in angry “sharing”, closing of laptops and quiet seething.
After all, to bait is to trick – to use something that looks a certain way to lure another into doing something, usually against their interests. For my part, I sincerely hope next year’s word of the year might be “rage-harnessing”.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a research fellow at TCD’s Long Room Hub.
