English is one of those languages that offers the possibility of saying in two words what a phrase as long as this one requires in Spanish. And today Oxford University Press has decided to recognize one of them as the word of the year. Well, actually there are two: ‘brain rot’, the definition of “the alleged deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially as a result of excessive consumption of material (mainly on the Internet) considered trivial or simple.”
Some trend experts were already warning in 2024 that if you know what it means, you are probably one of the victims of this feeling of “mental rot.” Yes, after spending long periods of time doing scroll on TikTok, watching a reel of Instagram after another or wondering why
This year’s word has been the winner in a survey of more than 37,000 people, in addition to Oxford University Press’s analysis of the terms we invented or incorporated over time before incorporating them into its English dictionary. According to their data, the use of ‘brain rot’ has skyrocketed 230% in the last 12 months.
The term also serves to describe both the feeling that remains after losing track of time while viewing random content on social networks, and to catalog that material itself. In the words of journalist Taylor Lorenz, author of ‘Extremely online’, that ‘brain rot’ content It is “low-quality material created for people with broken minds.”
However, ‘brain rot’ is not an internet word, no matter how much algorithms have helped it creep onto all our screens. The concept first appeared in WaldenHenry David Thoreau’s text published in 1854. “While England strives to cure the rot of the potato,” Thoreau wrote, “will no one endeavor to cure the rot of the brain, which prevails so much more widely and fatally ?”
The American writer and philosopher thus criticized society’s tendency to reject complex ideas and avoid debates in favor of increasingly simple ideas. And it seems that we have not found the solution because, two centuries later, the same words serve to reflect “one of the dangers we perceive in our digital lives and how we spend our free time,” as explained by the president of Oxford Languages, Casper Grathwohl. , in a statement of the institution.
“If we look at the evolution of the words of the year over the last two decades, we can see society’s growing concern with how our online lives evolve and how Internet culture permeates everything from what we do to the topics we talk about.” , adds the expert.
Grathwohl highlights something else: the term ‘brain rot’ has been adopted equally by the two youngest generations of Internet users, the Z (born between 1995 and 2010) and the Alpha (between 2010 and 2020). “They are precisely the two groups of users responsible for using and creating the content to which this term refers,” says the expert. “These communities have amplified expression through social media, the exact same place that is supposed to cause that ‘brain rot’.”
And this is how “mental rot” has ousted other terms whose use has also skyrocketed since the end of 2023:
- ‘Demure’, the term that also became a trend in Spanish and represented the intention of appearing modest or modest — although it did not have much political implications.
- ‘Dynamic pricing’, the technique that leads brands to change prices according to market conditions
- ‘Lore’, the context we need to understand a situation or a character
- ‘Romantasy’, that genre of fiction that combines fantasy and romantic novels
- ‘Slop’ the content – whether images or texts – created with artificial intelligence and that, if you consume too much, can make you hooked on the word of the year
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