Here’s a hot take: black South Africans shouldn’t pay taxes as a form of reparations. That’s right, I said it. We’ve done enough for this country.
The descendants of Van Riebeeck and co should fund the country for a while. I hear one of them signed a trillion-dollar pay package at the end of last year. Did your blood boil a little?
If your fingers were already furiously typing a rebuttal or screenshotting that sentence so you could share it with a caption about “the state of journalism these days”, then congratulations, you’re a victim of the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2025, “rage bait”. If you’ve been living in a world disconnected from the dopamine crackhouse that is the internet, “rage bait” is content specifically designed to provoke anger and outrage. If engagement were a driver, “rage bait” would be Lewis Hamilton.
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Nothing works better. Oxford’s choice of “rage bait” as the word of the year is like an MRI documenting our collective cognitive decline. To understand how we got here, we need to look at the trail of words that brought us here.
In 2020, Oxford couldn’t even choose a word. The year was too unprecedented, too chaotic, too everything. Cambridge went with “quarantine”.
Sweet, wasn’t it? We thought isolation was the problem. We were still in survival mode, still believing that if we could just get through this, things would return to normal.
Then 2022 gave us “goblin mode” from Oxford — the year we collectively decided that pretending to have our lives together was too exhausting. Word games and giving up on pants. 2023 gave us “rizz” from Oxford, while Cambridge chose “hallucinate” — referring to AI’s tendency to confidently generate complete nonsense, like a third-year politics student trying to make a point.
One word about humans trying to be James Bond circa Sean Connery, another about machines making things up. Sounds a bit like modern dating. At home, we’re rage bait connoisseurs.
Our political discourse has been rage bait since the first mention of Springbok quotas. Last year, Oxford selected “brain rot”, finally acknowledging that we were all slowly being poisoned by low-quality digital content. Cambridge went with “manifest”, the delusion that imagining something hard enough makes it real.
We knew we were deteriorating and thought we could wish our way out of it. Which brings us to 2025: “rage bait” and “parasocial”. We’ve gone from isolated to angry and emotionally attached to strangers on the internet who are probably Russian bots.
X in South Africa is a rage bait factory with occasional interruptions for load-shedding memes. So are the WhatsApp groups and any attempt to get callers to chime in on radio. Remember John Robbie and Redi Tlhabi? We used to inject rage bait into our veins for breakfast.
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