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All righty, folks, today we are going to go through the words of the year, 2025, from all of the dictionaries.

They all pick a new word of the year. We're

going to go through those in just a minute. Apparently, according to Time magazine,

the Oxford Dictionary has declared the word of the year rage bait. Apparently, it was first

used online in 2002 in a posting on the online form Usenet to describe

drivers' reactions to other drivers flashing their lights at them when seeking to pass in an apparent

deliberate attempt to provoke.

It's funny to see how these things grow.

Of course, rage bait now just means that you're posting something online in order to draw

rage from others.

And that, I think, is a pretty good word of the year. A lot of rage bait being posted online these days. And I've heard it used in a couple of ways in the online space. One is that you are posting something in order to earn the clicks and the virality off of others being enraged. And so you are posting it and then you say, this is rage bait, meaning like, yeah, we're supposed to be enraged. And then there is also just kind of trollery that generates rage itself. And that's also, I've seen used as sort of rage bait. Like don't take the bait. Don't take. But I think the general idea, which is that most Americans now, a huge number of Americans and people globally,

are being emotionally manipulated in the online space by stories that sometimes are true and

sometimes are false, but are all rage bait. I think this is totally right. You do not experience

rage bait nearly as much in your real life as you do in the online space. The online space is programmed

to give you the stuff that generates a viral emotional response in your real life as you do in the online space. The online space is programmed to give you the stuff that generates a viral emotional response in you.

That's what rage bait is all about, so that's actually not a bad pick by Oxford.

Macari Dictionary, known as the Arbiter of Australian English, has picked a word of the year.

It is AI Slop, which is defined as low-quality content created by generative AI,

often containing errors and not requested by the user.

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