“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right
to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

- George Orwell

To ballyrag or bullyrag someone is to harass or abuse him, in the more violent sense of the word, or less dramatically, to tease him. Fowler says that the derivation is unknown, and that ballyrag is the far more common and preferable form, but other dictionaries give bullyrag as the first choice. To rag someone is to tease him, in American usage, but in British usage, to do rather more than that: to persecute him with crude practical jokes, with rag also a noun denoting that kind of tormenting behavior. The bullyrag form probably has some connection with bully, embellished by rag. In any case, bally- or bullyragging is reprehensible abusive horseplay and badgering, the kind employed, for example, in the sort of fraternity hazing that is a practice now mercifully fading from the scene.

Update: