Oxford's Word of the Year: 'Brain Rot' (bbc.com)
- Reference: 0175575869
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/12/02/002258/oxfords-word-of-the-year-brain-rot
- Source link: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2n2r695nzo
> It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The word's usage saw an increase of 230% in its frequency from 2023 to 2024. Psychologist and Oxford University Professor, Andrew Przybylski says the popularity of the word is a "symptom of the time we're living in". Brain rot beat five other shortlisted words including demure, Romantasy and dynamic pricing... [And "slop".]
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> The first recorded use of brain rot dates much before the creation of the internet — it was written down in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden. He criticises society's tendency to devalue complex ideas and how this is part of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort. It leads him to ask: "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?" The word initially gained traction on social media among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities, but it's now being used in the mainstream as a way to describe low-quality, low-value content found on social media.
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> Prof Przybylski says "there's no evidence of brain rot actually being a thing. Instead it describes our dissatisfaction with the online world and it's a word that we can use to bundle our anxieties that we have around social media."
[2]The New York Times points out that Oxford's past "word of the year" selections included "podcast" and "selfie"
> [Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the company's dictionary division] noted the finalists were heavy on old-fashioned words that young people had repurposed in semi-ironic ways — the linguistic equivalent, he said, of "bell-bottoms coming back into fashion...."
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> "Slop" has undergone a similar update. There was a spike of more than 300 percent over the past year in references not to pig feed, but to "art, writing or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic or inaccurate," according to Oxford. Like "brain rot," it "represents the underbelly of today's linguistic churn," Grathwohl said. "There's a sense that we are drowning in mediocre experiences as digital lives get clogged."
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2n2r695nzo
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/arts/brain-rot-oxford-word.html
"Brain rot" is not one word (Score:2)
"Brain rot" is not one word.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see bullcrap like this.
Re: (Score:2)
"Editor" doesn't mean anything any more. See /. editors.
Re: (Score:1)
It's one word if we remove the space! Brainrot or bust.
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Go easy on them. They're suffering from brain-rot.
Re:"Brain rot" is not one word (Score:4, Informative)
I appreciate and support your effort to be technically correct, but in this case it's technically [1]an open compound word [grammarly.com]. Like hot dog, or contact lens.
[1] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/grammar/open-and-closed-compound-words/
Re: (Score:2)
> I appreciate and support your effort to be technically correct, but in this case it's technically [1]an open compound word [grammarly.com]. Like hot dog, or contact lens.
Those are still two words. Stop gas lighting every one.
[1] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/grammar/open-and-closed-compound-words/
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I'm not gaslighting everyone, only you. You're just wrong.
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Hahah, no. It is not one word.
My money was on sane washing (Score:2)
Which I think had a hell of a lot more impact on our lives than brain rot. Hell brain rot is a really old phrase. We used to say it about TV when I was a kid and I'm old as dirt.
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[1]Can confirm. [getyarn.io]
I distinctly remember there being some big to-do about "V-chips" being mandated in TVs, because television used to be the old bogeyman which was destroying young minds. TV was also the subject of an Oompa Loompa song (along with one about childhood obesity, ironically enough).
It's always something new that's supposedly going to ruin the next generation, and the fears always end up being overblown. Comic books, rock music, television, video games - social media is just the latest on the list.
[1] https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/99b8cf0a-9b26-4b13-bbc3-2671fc529761
Exhaustion and Dominance media theory (Score:3)
Although the social media isn't that much different from how people were glued to the boob tube a generation ago, theory on how this is different.
Ye olden days of television were pretty much defined by limited selection, so you basically became habituated to crap.
But now there is a long tail of of high quality media available for free, so why do people seek out crap?
I think they are too mentally exhausted after sorting through all spin and chatter in their lives to engage with thoughtful media. TicTok is a symptom, not a cause.
Of course people could always disconnect, but after a generation of atrophied social skills, there isn't much capacity beyond Idiocracy.
And Thoreau could be pretty simplistic himself (but beautiful prose).
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Low-brow entertainment can still be quite humorous. I was browsing FB's short format videos earlier and saw some moron attempting to start a small hand-cranked diesel engine which he'd failed to initially secure. It went about as well as you'd expect, with the engine bouncing and sliding all over in protest of his futile attempts to start it.
The comments were comedy gold.
Brain Rot (Score:2)
A good modern example of 'Brain Rot' is the loss of capacity to count to two, thus
confusing one word with two words and being incapable of discerning a single
word from a multitude of them.
Re:Ah, now I get it. (Score:4, Informative)
Well in this case, were they referring to an award, they may have a point as far as this one goes. Brain rot is two words, and therefore represents a concept, not a word. It seems Oxford has lost the ability to count.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's yet another one of the hundreds of oddities of the English language, which is a result of pidgin becoming creole, and then becoming an actual language. The rules surrounding compound words are complicated enough that most native speakers don't even know how to use them correctly. But this is in fact a compound word, and the reason for that is even dumber than you probably think:
[1]https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/gen... [purdue.edu]
I think whoever wrote this pretty well nails it:
[2]https://www.stcloudstate.edu/w... [stcloudstate.edu]
See the exam
[1] https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/punctuation/hyphen_use.html
[2] https://www.stcloudstate.edu/writeplace/_files/documents/grammar-punctuation/hyphen-rules.pdf
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In Elizabethan times, there was no standardized way to spell anything. They just wrote they way things sounded, so the same word could come across with two different spellings.
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Look who's talking.
And the real question is why didn't Doctorow take credit for this term too?
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> And the real question is why didn't Doctorow take credit for this term too?
'cause he hasn't written a book about brain rot... yet.
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Nah, arguing politics just tends to become more appealing with advancing age. If I had to take a guess, it's either because you were promised some fantastic future that didn't happen, or the changing world seems scary and you long for simpler times. Ironically, my partner's 9-year-old nephew launched into a rant at his family's Thanksgiving dinner about how he hates AI, so I guess you're never too young to feel the world is changing too quickly.