My parents spend half of the year on an island off the coast of North Carolina where many of the residents speak a distinct and alienating dialect of English—the Ocracoke or “Hoi Toider” brogue, which the BBC describes as “a mix of Elizabethan English, Irish and Scottish accents, and pirate slang.” The other half, they spend around their four children, who are in their 20s and early 30s and also speak in a manner that can be perplexing.
One of my sisters, who is a math genius, will interject, “New lore just dropped!” while my mom relays family gossip. My other sister, who has an advanced degree, will refer to minor inconveniences by claiming that she’s about to “unalive” herself. The other, who is in medical school, will express surprise or approval by saying “not” at the front of a sentence—like, “Not mom making an extra batch of molasses cookies for me.” And I’m probably the worst offender, even though I’m the sister whose job is “sentences.” I’ll tell my parents that I’m frustrated with the vacant shelves at their local grocery store by saying, “It’s giving apocalypse,” or that I don’t want to order Chinese food for dinner because I’m more “in a place of pizza.”
This manner of speaking is a symptom (mild, I think) of what many people have started terming “brain rot.” Oxford University Press chose this as its word of the year for 2024 and defined it as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” In general, brain rot can also refer to surrealist content created to entertain people whose attention spans have presumably withered away thanks to time spent scrolling, or to a state of general onlineness that has rewired one’s mind. Writing about the term last month, my colleague John Hendrickson described the tendency of online ephemera to just sort of “seep into our skulls.”
On the one hand, talking this way is just about fitting in. It’s a trend, like any other in the history of young people using words their parents and other authority figures don’t know. On the other, the ease with which my friends, siblings, and I slide into this mode is a bit unsettling. It’s so simple to start tacking “if you even care” onto the end of sentences for effect and so difficult to stop. When I hear myself tell a co-worker that I’m “not beating the idiot allegations” after making a silly mistake, I worry that something has really gone wrong.
These turns of phrase have infected my speech even though I deliberately limit my exposure to short-form video. It’s the way my friends talk in our group chats and the way my co-workers talk in Slack. It’s the way that podcast hosts talk in my ear. I know I’m not alone, because people in my life complain about their own brain-rot speech patterns all the time. I’ve also seen strangers do it. “This might just be a me thing, but do you guys ever have those phrases that if you don’t say them, like, your brain doesn’t work?” a young woman asked in a TikTok video I came across recently. Two of her examples were “WHICH COULD MEAN NOTHING!!!” and “(Derogatory),” which are meant to be written in comments or short-form posts, but have slid across the have slid across the barrier between the online and real worlds and are now spoken aloud.
That barrier seems especially porous at the moment, and naturally some hand-wringing has followed. Children have begun deploying such phrases (and related nonsense words), to the vexation of their parents and teachers. The New York Times found health experts who view brain rot as a “a coping mechanism for people who may have other underlying disorders that may lead them to numb themselves with mindless scrolling or overlong gaming sessions”; others have called it “a condition of mental fogginess, lethargy, reduced attention span, and cognitive decline that results from an overabundance of screen time.”
But these concerns are a bit overwrought. Brain rot is an entertaining way to talk—more appealing and adaptable than the manic “TikTok voice” used by would-be professional influencers, which is inappropriate in offline conversation because it makes the speaker sound like a haunted doll. Older internet vernacular involved quoting memes or making references to nerd culture, but brain rot offers strange sentence constructions and rhetorical tics with a broad range of possible applications. These are easy ways to spruce up otherwise bland statements. For instance, I recently saw a post that read, “No because what do you mean it’s Christmas Eve and not just another random Tuesday.” The explanation for these turns of phrase has to be, at least partly, that the enormous audience of the internet puts some pressure on us to be entertaining at all times. “He’s so me for this” just sounds better than “This is something I would do!” and “We’re so back” has more impact than “Cool!” or “Yay!”
A lot of these linguistic quirks originated in written text from various online fandoms. Stans tend to type out phrases like “no because what do you mean” when experiencing intense emotion or surprise (which happens a lot). This is why a sudden litany of “no because what do you mean” posts was actually how I learned that Liam Payne, a former member of the boy band One Direction, had died unexpectedly last October. (“No because what do you mean liam payne died …”) Fans also abbreviate phrases a lot because they’re usually speaking in some kind of shorthand to other people for whom it will be legible. This leads to randomly truncated thoughts: Instead of writing, “I love the way she sings,” one might simply write, “The way she sings” (or whatever it is she does).
To help my thinking about how brain-rot language has evolved into its current state, I returned to the internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s 2019 book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. The book was published before TikTok’s ascendancy and the total dominance of short-form video, and it dealt almost exclusively with written internet speech—a huge corpus, which McCulloch described as a historically anomalous collection of “informal writing” by regular people. We were living in a “revolutionary period in linguistic history,” she argued, in part because of how much writing we were producing and how much better we get at expressing ourselves the more we try. In other words, posting is a skill. However low your opinion of the social internet is, it would be hard to deny that what is considered funny on social media now is incredibly sophisticated compared with what was considered funny 15 years ago (pictures of cats saying “I CAN HAZ CHEESEBURGER?”).
McCulloch also wrote a linguistic analysis of doge memes for the now-defunct blog The Toast in 2014, in which she explained the en vogue internet grammar of that day as the awkward tacking on of common modifiers in places they didn’t belong. These were often two-word phrases, she wrote, giving the examples of “much feels” and “very art.” She thought the roots of this manner of speaking were both online and off—a combination of the “stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence” that was (and is) popular on social media and the baby talk that people use with their pets. Some people at the time feared that this incredibly irritating way of speaking would stick around. It mostly hasn’t, though you can clearly see its influence in the way that internet language innovators strip sentences down to make new oddities today.
The truth is that brain-rot phrases are a conversational crutch. They signal that you are in the know; when you say them out loud, you can give them a tinge of irony and make clear that you are aware it’s kind of silly. The tone is internet-y because it is weird but also because it’s glib and a bit removed. There’s plausible deniability in every phrase, which makes sense because being sincere online is often how you ended up getting humiliated—dunked on for being wrong, “canceled” after being interpreted in bad faith. The most humiliating thing you can do is, of course, say something boring, and saying something in a nonsensical way for no reason helps avoid that, too.
Today, a going theory about the cause of brain-rot language—as implied by its name—is that people have gotten stupider. But I don’t think this is true. The people I know who talk this way are sometimes frustrated with themselves for saying “Let him cook” too much, but they’re not dumb—they’re amusing, perceptive, have a broad range of reference, and think critically about the things they’re talking about in such a doofy way. They are also, like me, being a bit lazy and noncommittal when speaking casually. There are worse things to be.
