The annual Oxford Word of the Year has been revealed, and the title goes to “anger fodder”. It allegedly faced stiff competition against terms like “presence harvesting” – essentially charisma, a concept for which numerous serviceable words already exist. The other runner-up was “biological tweaking”, a imprecisely defined lifestyle improvement that suggests somehow gaining control over the code of aging itself to combat the effects of aging. Given that “charisma cultivation” is unnecessary and most “biological tweaks” are often questionable, the race may not have been that intense after all, but the buzzword isn’t necessarily welcome.
The Problem with Rage Bait
Anger fodder, as many are aware, is the sharing, typically online, of material deliberately crafted to provoke anger. It is far from a mythical concept; studies has consistently demonstrated that online engagement is primarily motivated by hostility toward outsiders. It also isn’t a quirky feature of modern life, akin to artisan drinks. Instead, it fosters echo chambers, exacerbates societal fractures, and gradually undermines confidence in reason itself, as individuals become so estranged from any viewpoint outside their own that they stop trusting anything except word of mouth. One may posit that elevating such a term is somewhat analogous to making “ethnic cleansing” the word of the year in 1992 during the conflict in the Balkans. Undoubtedly, people employed it often, but that didn’t make it a fun quiz answer. As it happens, it was declared the Anti-Word of the year by a German linguistic society, which censured its euphemistic nature. And that assessment is fair.
The Lifecycle of a Controversial Word
Given the absence of a formal right of appeal for lexical selections, we can perhaps strive to phase out words that have ceased to be effective, been distorted beyond recognition, or caused more problems than they solved. “Mansplain” was a New York Times Word of the Year in 2010, was a finalist for Oxford’s honor in 2015, and then made it into the Oxford English Dictionary three years later. By that time, a critical reaction was already gathering steam. It entered the cultural lexicon eager for a way to describe the frustrating experience of “Why is this male acquaintance explaining my own specialization to me?” Countless individuals, especially female-identifying people, had encountered that precise scenario that the term was instantly resonant. Yet its application was broad, and it caught some individuals who were merely discussing something they did have expertise in, and they happened to be guys. In some circles, it was misapplied to mean little more than “a man is talking”.
Rhetorical Weaponization and Meaning Shift
The term was most recently deployed, for instance by the Chancellor in a pre-budget interview, to suggest “criticism I face is rooted in my gender”. This prompted a comment from the Business Secretary, who argued on a political program: “We've seen little but complaints about misogyny and mansplaining from the Chancellor.” Setting aside her particularly combative language, she had a point: a senior official needs to justify their fiscal plans without claiming unfair play of their opponents. However, the minister then claim that the budget was not aligned with Christian values, stating that “the early Christian church operated without a welfare state”. This unleashed an torrent of what some might call pointed explanations regarding the existence of the Roman Empire, including one journalist’s pointed question: “She claims there was no state. Who carried out the crucifixion, then?”
The Limits of the Label
Yet, because these comments came from individuals who had greater expertise on ancient Rome than the minister, the fact that they were all men – even the fact that they were playing into a separate online trend about “daily reflections on Rome” – did not qualify as mansplaining. It was, fundamentally, correcting someone with condescension. The core idea, therefore, was misused by the first politician, dismissed by the opposition figure, and potentially was rightly invoked by commentators. However, the politician’s depth of ignorance was so significant on that particular topic that one simply cannot mansplain to her – at least not about that subject. The slipperiness of the term is too slidey; no compound word could hold its meaning firm. Or perhaps this entire line of reasoning is just an attempt to rage-bait a certain figure.
