2 hours ago
2
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.
Since there is no right of appeal on which word has landed hardest each year, we ought at least to be able to decommission words that have lost their usefulness, irrevocably changed meaning or brought more trouble than they were worth. “Mansplain” was a New York Times word of the year in 2010, was shortlisted for Oxford’s WOTY in 2015, and then made it into the Oxford English Dictionary three years later, by which time there was already a backlash, or Mansplainers for Justice movement, if you prefer. It landed on linguistic ground parched for a way to say, “Why is this guy at a party explaining something to me that I actually wrote a book about?” So many people had had that experience, or similar, that it was immediately popular – yet its net was wide, and caught a few people who were explaining something they did know about and they happened to be guys, which is to say, it came to be used (by some people, definitely not me) to mean “a man is talking”.
It was also repurposed, most recently by Rachel Reeves in a pre-budget interview, to mean “some people are criticising me, and I am a woman”. This prompted Kemi Badenoch to weigh in, on the Political Thinking podcast, by saying: “All we have had [from the chancellor] is wallowing in self-pity and whining about misogyny and mansplaining.” Apart from her needlessly ugly and bellicose language, she had a point (this is the first and hopefully the last time I have thought this); you’ve got to be able to defend your economic decisions, as chancellor, without crying foul on the characters of those criticising them. But Badenoch then went on to claim that the budget was unchristian, on the basis that “in early Christian times, there was no state or welfare”. This prompted an absolute barrage of what some might call mansplaining about the nature of the Roman state, including the FT’s Stephen Bush’s indelible question: “There was no state. Who does she think crucified him, an anarchist collective?”
Yet since it all came from people who knew more about the Romans than Badenoch, the fact that they were all guys, even the fact that they were all playing into a separate masculinity meme, “thinking about the Roman empire at least once a day”, did not make it mansplaining. It was simply explaining in a condescending tone of voice. The original concept, then, was misused by the chancellor, attacked by the leader of the opposition, could have been deployed by civil society, but such was the depth of the opposition leader’s ignorance that it’s not possible to mansplain to her (not about Rome, anyway). The relativism is too slidey, no compound word could contain it. Or maybe I’m just trying to rage-bait Badenoch.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
-
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
