Have you ever pinched your friend because it might piss them off? And then laughed when they did. Or have you ever turned the light off in the bathroom when your sibling was using it? Well guess what! You’ve been rage baiting everyone around you. It’s the act of doing or saying something intentionally that might piss someone off, just for the joy of it. 

But as Oxford Dictionary names “rage bait” the Word of the Year, the phenomenon takes on a sharper, more strategic form online. What begins as stealing your sibling’s chocolates becomes, in the attention economy, a calculated attempt to hook an increasingly desensitised audience. Creators provoke on purpose now — tossing out controversial statements purely to stir outrage. Timelines swell with clips like “Here’s why women belong in the kitchen”, with Andrew Tates and Jubilees abroad, and closer home the Uorfi Javeds, Puneet Superstars, and Orrys — divisive, yes, but impossible to ignore.