The Return of Rage-Bait – and the Birth of Soothe-Bait
Earlier this week, I wrote an angry article for the Daily Sceptic all about the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2025, ‘rage-bait’. This word (or two words joined by a hyphen) was defined by OED lexicographers as denoting misleading online stories or social media posts which cunningly trick readers into clicking on them by having misleading, fury-causing headlines. The OED’s choice of winning word, I suggested, was somewhat politically motivated, designed to discredit websites like our own as being mere wicked purveyors of fake news, motivated either by profit or by ideology, of an implied ‘far-Right’ nature.
After the Word of the Year was unveiled, I had an idea it would not be long before certain journalists out there began opportunistically latching onto the OED’s propagandistically useful choice of winning word as a handy quick method of discrediting things they simply did not want to be true, even though they were. So, I did a simple search to look for evidence of any such incipient trend being born anew before my very eyes. What I discovered ironically caused me much annoyance.
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It’s curious that the time-honoued media practice of trying to draw the punters to an article by using a headline that hadn’t the strictest relevance to the article’s content should now be thought to need a New Word. A lame effort by the erudite chaps and chapesses at the OED, methinks.
Yes indeed these pretentious neologisms are one of the many plagues of this horrendous century.
Well I can’t remember what we used to call “selfies” before ‘selfie’ was a word.🤔 Anyone?…Anyone? I mean, what did we say? How did we cope?😦
Those were the days when you’d put your film in at Boots to be developed and chuck half of them because they were rubbish. The ‘Opal Fruits/Oil of Ulay’ days, as I call them.
When you had eight pictures on a roll-film for your holiday, you weren’t going to mess up a picture of York Minster with your own ugly mug.
A slightly narcissistic photo of myself and some other thing?
OED needs to keep itself relevant I guess, hence coming out with this crap…
More journalistic gold. Thank you!
Especially the newly minted word master-baiter. Priceless.
Excellent article. Here’s a public comment along these lines from the Daily Mail article detailing the “rage” of locals in Windsor objecting to the six-mile exclusion zone around the home of the Prince of Wales and his family:
“Welcome to the UK. I live in Denton in Manchester. We are getting Somalian, Afghan, Kurdish and Sudanese families moving in. They have a very poor grasp of English language and culture, but give them a Motability BMW and a blue badge and they can steer themselves into a disabled spot in an Aldi car park, no problem. And Boom, as if by a miracle, they can walk very quickly into the Aldi for their shopping. It must be a divine intervention.”
I didn’t think I’d ever see the phrase ‘Reputable News Source’ and ‘Wales Online’ in the same sentence. Here in Wales there’s a popular meme that has the main character from The Royale Family saying “Marge WOL is talking B*llox again” on a lot of their articles where they allow comment.