If you spend a lot of time looking at the low-quality content that scrolls across social media, you’ll want to look into the term “brain rot”, which was named word of the year by Oxford Publishing. .
- For Oxford Editions, “brain rot” or “brain rot” defines the past year.
- “The frequency of use of this expression increased by 230% between 2023 and 2024.”
- This term refers to “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially considered to be the result of overconsumption of material (today particularly online) considered trivial or non-stimulating.”
We know: the editor of the Oxford dictionary always defines the past year with a single word. For this edition, more than 37,000 people participated in this process. “Our language experts compiled a shortlist of six words reflecting the moods and conversations that helped shape the past year. After two weeks of voting and discussion, our experts came together to review the public’s contributions, voting results and our linguistic data”, can we read in the press release. For 2024, the selected term is “brain rot”.
“Brain burp”: what is it?
This word is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially considered the result of overconsumption of material (today particularly online) considered trivial or non-stimulating. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.” The term “brain rot” was chosen as it is increasingly used to express concerns about the impact of excessive consumption of low-quality online content, particularly on social media. Indeed, “the frequency of use of this expression increased by 230% between 2023 and 2024”.
If today, in the digital age, this word refers to the negative effects of consuming low-quality content on the brain, the definition was not the same in 1854 when the term was found in the book Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which chronicled his experience of a simple way of life in nature. “In his conclusions, he criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favor of simple ones, and considers this to reflect a general decline in mental effort and intellectual.”
Mental health: “society is increasingly concerned about the evolution of our virtual lives”
“Considering Oxford’s word of the year for the past two decades (“rizz” in 2023 meaning “style, charm or attractiveness or the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner” ), we see that society is increasingly concerned about the evolution of our virtual lives and that Internet culture permeates a large part of who we are and what we talk about. declared Casper Grathwohlpresident of Oxford Languages. Fortunately, according to the publisher, a broader and more serious conversation about the potential negative impact of excessive consumption of this content on mental health, particularly among children and young people, is also gaining momentum. “Earlier this year, a mental health center in the United States even posted advice online on how to recognize and avoid brain rot.”
