“Rage bait” as Word of the Year? It’s a reason for hope

At first, I was sad to see that the linguist team at the Oxford English Dictionary had picked “rage bait” as the Word of the Year. But there’s no doubt it was the right choice.

As the wordsmiths explained in their Dec. 1 press release, rage bait is “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 content.” While they never use the term “MAGA,” there can be no doubt that they’re talking about the decentralized, mostly online propaganda that has created the movement and given so much power to Donald Trump.

A major form of rage bait is the endless stream of videos, photos, stories and memes — many outright fabricated — tha