The Offenserati

You know it’s been a long, hard, slogging start to the new year when the biggest pleasure of the week is discovering a new word. It can’t be any old word, though. It has to be a word for which the definition has been desperately searching for a succinct, descriptive term which has apparently not existed. One that has been bugging me for a while was put to me by a colleague who wanted a word to describe those who actively seek out and seemingly take pleasure in being offended by something. I racked my brain but I really couldn’t think of one: “Daily Mail reader” seemed to fit the bill but that is merely a subset of a much wider group that includes the self-righteous, unreasoningly witless and dim-wittedly cretinous. However, I came across a phase, in fact a collective noun, to describe the kind of baying mob that seems to descend in this age of Twitter, Facebook, Mumsnet and the BBC’s “Have Your Say” comments section. Those people are the offenserati.

I’ve tried to trace this phrase back and I can find a few references 5 years ago amongst Australian comedians. I’m assuming that they needed such a phrase since Australians do seem to have a habit of pressing the buttons of those who are likely to become incandescent with rage at the merest slight. To be honest, it’s one of the reasons I like Australian comics and their brash, politically incorrect, often scatological and usual dark humour is only really surpassed by New Zealand’s comedians whose sole raison d'être appears to be to take the piss out of Australians. Whatever the origin, the offenserati have probably been around for years, long before the advent of antipodean satirists, but they do appear to be a worryingly growing phenomenon.

That’s not to say that there are not things out there which will cause offense. Most people are quite capable of avoiding those things that they find offensive and I have sympathy with those that are exposed to offensive material against their will. The interesting thing with the offenserati is that they will actively seek out things to be offended by whether this is responding to chain emails, social media campaigns, clicking on internet links that are quite explicitly not for the fainthearted or by reading the Daily Mail which is a magnet for the offenserati and their faux outrage. It does lead to the question of what they actually get out of it. I suppose it gives them something to do.

So now I’m happy that I have a new word: offenserati. The only thing that worries me is that it’s a plural. What is the singular? What does one call a single individual who gains pleasure by taking offense? An offenseratus?