Cases of brain rot
My parents spent half of each year on a small island off the coast of North Carolina, where many of the residents spoke a unique and alienated dialect of English—Ocraco, or “Hoi Toider” Bullock, The BBC describes it as “a mixture of Elizabethan English”. , Irish and Scottish accents and pirate slang. ” The other half is spent around four children, who are in their late 20s and early 30s and speak in confusing ways.
One of my math whiz sisters would chime in: “The new legend just dropped!” while my mom spread the family gossip. My other sister with an advanced degree would mention minor inconveniences by claiming that she herself was “dying.” Another person in medical school would say “no” at the beginning of a sentence to express surprise or approval, such as “Mom didn't make me an extra batch of molasses cookies.” I was probably the worst offender, even though I was my sister's job It's “sentence”. I would tell my parents that I was frustrated with the empty shelves at the local grocery store and I would say, “This is the end of the world,” or that I didn’t want to order Chinese food for dinner because I “liked it better.” Pizza place. “
This way of speaking is a symptom of what many have begun to call “brain rot” (mild in my opinion). Oxford University Press has chosen this word as the 2024 Word of the Year, defining it as “the presumed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially due to excessive consumption of material considered trivial or unchallenging (now especially online content). Generally speaking, “brain rot” can also refer to surreal content created to entertain people whose attention may be lost due to the time spent scrolling, or due to general status and disappear. online sex This changes people's minds. Writing about the term last month, my colleague John Hendrickson described a trend of online ephemera that “seeps into our skulls.”
On the one hand, speaking this way is just about fitting in. This is a trend that has occurred throughout history for young people to use words unknown to their parents and other authority figures. On the other hand, it’s a little disturbing how easily my friends, siblings, and I fall into this pattern. It's easy to add “if you even cared” to the end of a sentence for effect, and hard to stop. When I hear myself telling colleagues that I “didn't beat the charge of being an idiot” after making a stupid mistake, I worry that something is really wrong.
Although I deliberately limited my exposure to short films, these phrases infected my speech. This is how my friends talk in group chats and how my colleagues talk in Slack. This is how podcast hosts speak into my ear. I know I'm not alone in that people in my life are always complaining about their brain rotting speech patterns. I've seen strangers do this too. “This might just be me, but have you ever said something like, if you don’t say it, like, your brain doesn’t work?” I saw a young woman ask in a TikTok video recently . Two of her examples were “This probably makes no sense!!!” and “(derogatory),” which should have been written in a comment or brief post, but have crossed the barrier between the online and the real world and are now used Read aloud.
At the moment, this barrier seems particularly porous, and naturally some frustrating situations can arise. Children have begun using phrases like this (and related nonsense words), much to the annoyance of their parents and teachers. new york times Health experts view brain rot as “a coping mechanism for people who may have other underlying conditions that may cause them to numb themselves through mindless scrolling or excessive gaming sessions”; others call it “due to screens” A condition of mental fogginess, drowsiness, shortened attention span, and cognitive decline caused by too much time.”
But these concerns are overblown. Brain rot is a fun way to talk that is more engaging and adaptable than the manic “TikTok voices” of wannabe professional influencers, which are inappropriate in offline conversations because it makes the speaker listen Looks like a haunted doll. Older internet vernacular involved referencing memes or references to nerd culture, but Brainrot offers strange sentence structures and rhetorical tics with a wide range of possible applications. These are simple ways to spruce up a bland statement. For example, I recently saw a post that said, “No, because you meant it was Christmas Eve, not just another random Tuesday.” The explanation for these phrasings is, at least in part, due to the vastness of the Internet The audience puts a certain amount of pressure on us to always be entertained. “This is what he's for” sounds better than “This is what I would do!” “We're back” is more impactful than “Cool!” or “Yeah!”
Many of these linguistic quirks originate from the written texts of various online fandom groups. When experiencing strong emotions or surprise (which happens often), Stans tend to type phrases like “No, because that's what you mean.” Which is why a sudden string of “no because what do you mean” posts was actually how I learned about the unexpected death of former member of boy band One Direction, Liam Payne, last October. (“No, because you mean Liam Payne is dead…”) Fans also often abbreviate phrases because they usually speak to other people in some shorthand way that others can understand. This results in random truncation of ideas: instead of writing “I like the way she sings,” one might simply write “the way she sings” (or whatever she does).
To help me think about how bad-brained language evolved to its current state, I reviewed internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s 2019 book, Because of the Internet: New rules for understanding language. Published before the rise of TikTok and the complete dominance of short-form videos, the book deals almost entirely with written internet speech—a vast corpus that McCulloch describes as a historically anomalous collection of ordinary people's “informal writing.” . We live in a “revolutionary period in the history of language,” she believes, in part because we produce so much and the more we try, the better we get at expressing ourselves. In other words, posting is a skill. No matter how low your opinion of the social internet, it’s hard to deny that what is considered funny on social media has become incredibly sophisticated now compared to what was considered funny 15 years ago (photos of cats saying “I can Eat a cheeseburger?”).
McCulloch also wrote a 2014 linguistic analysis of the doge meme for the now-defunct blog The Toast, in which she explained the then-popular internet syntax of awkward appendages where they didn't belong common modifiers. These are often two-word phrases, she writes, giving examples of “very feeling” and “very artistic.” She believes the roots of this way of speaking lie both online and offline – a combination of the “stylized incoherence of language that reflects emotional incoherence” popular on social media and the baby talk people use when talking to their pets. . Some people at the time were concerned that this extremely irritating way of speaking would continue. It largely didn't, although you can clearly see its influence in the way today's Internet language innovators streamline sentences to create new and strange things.
The truth is, those brain-dead phrases are conversational crutches. They show that you understand the situation; when you say these words out loud, you can bring a touch of sarcasm to them and make it clear that you know they're a little silly. The tone is Internet-esque because it's weird, but also because it's glib and a little out of touch with reality. There are seemingly legitimate denials in every sentence, which makes sense because appearing sincere online can often lead to you ultimately being humiliated—dunked on for a mistake, “cancelled” after being interpreted in bad faith. Of course, the most embarrassing thing you can do is say something boring, and saying meaningless things for no reason can also help avoid this.
Today, a popular theory as to why brains rot language (as the name suggests) is that people become stupider. But I don't think that's true. People I know who talk this way sometimes get frustrated that they say “let him cook” too much, but they're not stupid – they're funny, insightful, have a wide range of references, and are knowledgeable about Think critically about things they are talking about in such a stupid way. Like me, they were also somewhat lazy and noncommittal in their casual remarks. There are worse things to come.