December 3, 2024
2 min learn
Why ‘Brain Rot’ Is 2024’s Phrase of the 12 months
The phrase “brain rot” spiked 230 % from 2023 to 2024, in response to the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary
“Brain rot” is the official Phrase of the 12 months for 2024, in response to the Oxford English Dictionary’s writer, Oxford College Press. Right here’s how that august chronicler of English defines the phrase: mind rot is the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” ensuing from the “overconsumption” of trivial materials—particularly stuff discovered on the Web.
Mind rot is a symptom of senseless scrolling by nonsense memes and sludge content material. It’s the sensation of colleges warmly smothered by one too many AI-generated footage; see the off-putting depictions, in style on Fb, of Jesus fused with crustaceans.
After all, the time period doesn’t describe literal decomposition, which occurs quickly to most useless human brains (though, curiously, not all of them). “‘Brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time,” Oxford Languages president Casper Grathwohl stated in a press launch. “It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology.”
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The expression’s utilization frequency spiked 230 % between 2023 and 2024, the dictionary-maker says, and it was particularly widespread this 12 months on TikTok. It beat out 5 different phrases du jour curated by Oxford’s linguists and submitted for public voting, by which 37,000 folks participated. (One other shortlisted phrase was “slop,” which describes the low-quality photos and textual content churned out by massive language fashions.)
Notably, the expression might be most utilized by the individuals who eat or produce a lot of the content material blamed for mind rot. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have readily adopted the phrase, Grathwohl notes, with an angle each tongue-in-cheek and self-aware. It’s a joke, however it could have some tooth: 2024 was additionally a 12 months of pronounced issues about psychological well being harms and Web use. In June U.S. Surgeon Common Vivek Murthy known as for warning labels on social media platforms.
To make certain, mind rot has been with us for years. Earlier than the Web, tv was the nice brain-rotter of its time. And Oxford has traced the expression to its first recorded use in Walden, the 1854 e book by protohippie Henry David Thoreau. “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot,” Thoreau wrote, “will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot—which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” Our distractions might change, however our worries and complaints about them are ageless.
