Road rage is a term that first appeared in the 1980s. We will examine the definition of the expression road rage, where it came from and some examples of its use in sentences.
Road rage is violent, aggressive, or threatening behavior that is a reaction to an incident in a motor vehicle. Road rage may be hand gestures, insulting speech, dangerous retaliatory driving or physical injury to the object of the road rage. Sometimes both parties are at fault in a road rage incident, but other times one party is unaware that he has affronted the other driver. Road rage may be as harmless as a rude finger gesture as one driver passes another, or as deadly as an assault with a gun. The term road rage was coined sometime in the 1980s in the United States, though that is not to say that the phenomenon did not exist before this time. However, it was not until the 1980s that this subset of violent crime was identified.
Examples
A Pierre man was arrested Jan. 19 after police say he chased a carload of teenagers around Pierre and may have fired a gun at them during an apparent road rage incident. (The Capital Journal)
A November road rage incident has a Racine man facing charges, after he allegedly cut off a man in traffic, then allegedly assaulted him with a baseball bat. (The Journal-Times)
The mother of a 16-year-old teenager who was struck in the face by a Latrobe man in a road rage incident Thursday along Route 30 in Unity Township said she still can’t believe what happened. (The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
A woman involved in a road rage incident last summer filed a civil suit against the man she scuffled with while stopped on Van Voohris Road. (The Dominion Post)