Quick summary:
Wherever the internet took you this year, did you hear of brain rot? It’s Oxford University’s word of the year — but what is it? Today, we’ll unpack how the media talks about the phenomenon, how there’s actually more to it than nonsense internet culture, and the role of African American Vernacular English in the creation of slang trends, featuring reporting from PushBlack, Black History Year, and Parlé.
Making sense of Oxford’s word of the year
Hey, y’all,
I’m fascinated by the way the English language has evolved, and how it’s changed our culture in the process.
You know how dictionaries choose a word or phrase to sum up the year? That’s one good way to track our language as it morphs, especially when it comes to slang. So, without further ado, the word of the year is … drumroll please …
Brain rot?
Yes, that’s correct. Oxford University Press announced Monday that its 2024 selection for word of the year is indeed “brain rot.” It has become “a catch-all term for bizarre and semi-unintelligible extremely online language,” NBC reports.
If you’ve spent time on short-form video social media lately — TikTok, Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts — you may be familiar with this term as it soared in usage on those platforms this year.
In Oxford’s words, brain rot is “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.”
Not everyone agrees with this understanding of the term.
“Brain rot is just gentrified [African American Vernacular English] mixed with video game lingo,” one user of the platform X wrote in July.
It’s true: AAVE is a major source of modern English slang, particularly in the United States. The pattern of white people and mainstream channels appropriating it is no less common — and is often accelerated in the age of digital media.
Pick any buzzword from your lifetime, and odds are its roots can be traced back to a specific Black content creator, or AAVE at large. Take “rizz,” Oxford’s word of the year from 2023. The origin? Streamer Kai Cenat. Head back to 2015, when the platform Vine and the phrase “on fleek” were booming. The creator? 16-year-old Kayla Lewis. What about the 2000s and “swag”? Jay-Z and Soulja Boy.
Even “lit,” which may have seemed like a creation of 2010s hip hop, was being used by Nas in the ‘90s, PushBlack reports. Other terms embraced by Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha, such as “cap” and “no cap,” can be traced as far back as the 1900s, according to Parlé.
The point isn’t just that these popular slang words are directly lifted from Black culture and used to connote coolness, while linguistically displacing the original speakers and affording others with cultural currency. It’s also that AAVE adopters, not its creators, are too often the ones who get to decide when a word is no longer in fashion.
The expressions that one day are sweeping across a predominantly-white school cafeteria are quickly considered corny, or “cringe,” the next, leaving the actual owners of that culture in the lurch.
Now, we have “brain rot.” With it, a new level of familiar co-opting has been reached, to be followed by cultural profiting and eventual abandonment. Yet what’s being classified under the umbrellas of “bizarre” and “trivial” in mainstream media still has roots in real, honest culture.
With 1.35 billion speakers, English is the most spoken language around the world (for reasons much tied to imperialism and conquest at the hands of its Western speakers, but that’s a topic for another day). Given this enormity, one could even argue that there is no “single” English language, given the vast networks of dialects and slang.
What is necessary, though, is an understanding of where and how the language changes, and who stands to benefit. “Brain rot” is today — what’s tomorrow? As discourse native to social media, video games, and live streaming content become more popular than ever, virtual spaces centered on dialogue are likely to be a part of the equation, Taylor Lorenz writes in User Mag.
Granted, some uses of the term “brain rot” refer more specifically to the meme content and AI-based “sludge” one encounters while scrolling nowadays.
Yet the nuts and bolts that hold it all together, the apparent glue of what is now coined as “brain rot” is AAVE. It’s about time to recognize it.
“We will continue to stand out,” an episode of Black History Year’s podcast, 2-Minute Black History, affirms. “And create new ways of communicating with each other — without conforming to others’ standards.”
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