I ran across a reference today to something that's apparently not particularly new, but it's set me off on another one of these blog posts, dang it. The term was wrap rage, which I found (still with quotation marks -- single ones, how odd) in a C|NET article. They define wrap rage as "... what some consumers suffer when struggling to remove a product from a sealed plastic shell resistant to poking, prying, and tearing."
Not that this has ever happened to me. Haha.
Paul McFedries noted this term in 2005, but his cites go to 2003, and he notes that package rage is at least as old as 1999. I can only imagine that in those long-ago days, package rage was all about CDs.
So, time for a rage hunt, specifically of the form noun + rage. The first one that sprung to mind was road rage, which is when those morons around you just do not know how to drive. :-) (George Carlin: "Have you ever noticed? Anybody going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac.")
Not so many rages as I thought, tho. McFedries had already found road rage, of course (first cite 1989), plus Web rage (mad coz your connection is so slow), air rage (bad-mouthing flight crews with extreme prejudice), and work rage, which might lead to going postal (1996).
Another one I remembered was roid rage, allegedly set off by overuse of steroids. An artificial example is Cage Rage, which involves guys fighting in a ring.
The pattern is clear enough -- rage set off by noun. (Cage Rage therefore doesn't follow the pattern, so we'll just dismiss him.) Given the examples, one might also conclude that the pattern calls for a single-syllable word preceding rage to get the appropriate spondee meter.
AFAIK, this pattern is not used when rage is used in the sense of popularity, e.g. all the rage.
What else can we find (or heck, invent) along these lines?
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English has changed since its beginning as the tongue of the Anglo-Saxons, through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and now us. The process of change hasn't stopped. In this blog, we observe the language changing all around us. We don't opine (much) about these changes; we just note them as we see them ...
2 comments:
There's a use of "ode rage" from way back in 2002:
"In the first documented occurrence of workplace 'ode rage', Scottish hospital workers almost crashed their computer system after sending angry replies to emailed poems meant to keep them calm."
Here's the link.
Oooh, what an excellent example. A valuable lesson:
If your workers you seek to engage,
(Make them worth what they're paid for a wage)
Don't make things go worse --
Go light on the verse
Lest their efforts turn toward expressing ode rage.
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