I have seen some young kids like to tease somebody and laugh at the person and think this is a lots of fun for them, I would like to know if there is any word or idiom that explains their action.
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1Context could be important here to get the right idiom...is the target of the teasing laughing too, or is it more of a bullying of the target, albeit, verbally?– Kristina LopezDec 4, 2014 at 14:44
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Assuming that this attention is unwanted, I think "bully" is appropriate. "Verbal bully" if you want to be more specific. Don't dress it up in with obscure terms.– Hot LicksDec 5, 2014 at 4:44
9 Answers
bullying or harassment.
From wikipedia entry on bullying:
Behaviors used to assert such domination can include verbal harassment or threat, physical assault or coercion, and such acts may be directed repeatedly towards particular targets
A common idiom is:
make fun of somebody, also poke fun at somebody:
- to make someone seem ridiculous by making jokes about them When she first moved north, some people made fun of her southern accent.
(from TFD)
Give someone a hard time
This can be used if the persons in question all know each other and the teasing is meant to be fun rather than harassing someone.
Such a person (in Britain) is a wind-up merchant often abbreviated on the internet to WUM.
Notes
'wind' /waind/ is a verb. See the idiom 'to wind someone up'.
I don't know if the idiom is used in the US.
One lively idiomatic term is razz, which Robert Chapman & Barbara Kipfer, Dictionary of American Slang, fourth edition (2007) defines as follows:
razz v To insult and ridicule; NEEDLE ["To nag at someone; criticize regularly and smartingly"], RIDE ["To tease, heckle, make fun of"] : Is there ever any razzing about the fact that you report to your wife? {1920+; fr[om] raspberry ["A rude and contemptuous expulsion of breath through vibrating lips"]; found in the form razoo by 1890}
With the OP's "tease" in mind, I'm going to propose the word josh.
Josh: (verb) "Tease (someone) in a playful way. He loved to josh people" (Oxford Dictionaries).
Pester could work! Its definition (according to Merriam-Webster Online is "to harass with petty irritations : annoy."
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The definition "to harass with petty irritations" seems to have come from definition 2 of Merriam-Webster's entry for pester ("to harass with petty irritations : annoy"). I have added a link to that page of the MW site and credited the source in your answer. In future answers at this site, please include such citations. Thanks! Feb 27, 2017 at 5:46