An intimate understanding of Oxford’s Word of the Year

There is a series of Instagram videos I cannot stop watching.

The American creator makes what can only be described as culinary monstrosities while deliberately mispronouncing ingredients while she’s doing it. Corn is “kern.” Worcestershire is “wash your sister.” Garlic is “garlique.”

This gal loves adding extra vowels to words almost as much as she loves adding a “jizzle” (no thank you) of something or other to her “recipes” which are, like, three tubs of ice cream, a pound of butter and a loaf of white bread on a grill.

These videos make me absolutely incandescent with rage. And yet, I watch them all and forward them to my friends. I can’t tell if these videos are satirical and this woman is actually a brilliant performance artist, but I do know what she’s doing here.

She is making rage bait.

Rage bait is content that is deliberately infuriating. It can take on many forms and genres, but all of it designed to frustrate, annoy and enrage with the goal of driving up engagement by eliciting an emotional response in the viewer. And rage is among the most powerful emotional responses because it tends to be a particularly motivating one. People are more likely to share or comment if they are fired up about something.

Rage bait is a stickier form of click bait. Instead of “you won’t believe what happens next,” it’s “you won’t believe what happens next — and it’s gonna send you directly to the moon.”

Rage bait is also similar to trolling, in that it’s meant to get a rise out of people. Rage bait, however, has a specific goal of driving traffic, which makes it feel even more manipulative.

The comment sections under these rage bait videos often become communities of sorts, with people uniting to roast the creator.

But for the creator, all views, comments, likes and shares are good views, comments, likes and shares.

In the attention economy, it’s your time and eyeballs that matter, not what you actually think about the content.

Engagement is flattened into neutral data, just faceless, nameless numbers. The algorithm doesn’t know if you’re sharing something ironically or watching something out of horror. All it knows is that you can’t look away.

Rage bait is Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year, which is appropriate, even though, and not to be an annoying pedant, rage bait is two words. But it is a sign of the times. I’ve noticed an uptick in rage bait being produced (and therefore consumed) online and clearly others have, too.

I wonder if that’s because people are angrier now and consuming rage bait is an outlet for that. Or maybe rage bait just allows people to feel something — anything — in the great, numbing scroll, even if that thing is intensely negative and terrible for our collective mental health.

Why do I watch the recipe lady if she makes me furious? Do I, on some level, like having a place to project my rage when what I’m upset about probably has nothing to do with the recipe lady at all? Do I find her oddly compelling in the way one might find a cult documentary compelling? Wait, do I actually like the recipe lady?

But rage bait’s designation as word of the year is also a sign of the times linguistically. It’s algospeak.

The original definition of algospeak is the use of euphemisms to get around censors on social media, such as “unalived” instead of killed, or “seggs” instead of sex.

This year, linguist Adam Aleksic published a book called Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language that expands its definition, exploring the ways in which we communicate online are influencing how we communicate offline. That includes slang often erroneously attributed to gen Z when it actually comes from Black and queer communities, or specific tics and phrasing from TikTok that people casually adopt in their daily lives because they’ve been exposed to them repeatedly.

The last few Words of the Year have also been total algospeak. Last year’s was “brain rot,” the deterioration of our brains from consuming too much internet junk. The year before was “rizz,” a shortened form of “charisma.”

It makes sense that the word people are taking notice of how people talk online. They should. Language is constantly evolving and is shaped by culture.

Naming and defining something — a sensation, a phenomena, a trend — helps us better make out its contours. How could you choose not to engage in rage bait if you can’t identify it?

And these words aren’t always necessarily neologisms, either.

Cambridge’s Word of the Year, for example, is parasocial, which describes one-sided relationships a fan might have with a celebrity. The term was coined in the 1950s, but has gained new relevance as the concept of celebrity has changed.

Online, everyone can be a celebrity. People don’t just have parasocial relationships with actors and singers. They have them with creators and chatbots and, yes, rage farmers.

Like the recipe lady who gets so much of my attention and doesn’t even know I exist.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca