Tag: Word of the Year

Who are we to quibble with something with “Oxford” in its name that “brain rot” is two words, not one?

From TIME:

If you’ve been scrolling too long on social media, you might be suffering from “brain rot,” the word of 2024, per the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary.

After public consultation, Oxford University Press announced its choice—defined as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging” as well as “something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”—on Monday. “Brain rot” beat out five other finalists, including “dynamic pricing,” “lore,” “romantasy,” “slop,” and Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year “demure.”

“‘Brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time,” Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, said in the announcement. “It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology. It’s not surprising that so many voters embraced the term, endorsing it as our choice this year.”

The first recorded use of “brain rot,” according to Oxford University Press, was in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, published in 1854. “While England endeavours to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” wrote Thoreau in his treatise on transcendentalism.

It would seem the results of the 2024 presidential election are symptomatic of a virtual pandemic of brain rot across the electorate. Just pour some bleach on it.