Oxford’s Word of the Year Is About the Internet Melting Your Brain

Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and the increasingly nightmarish hellscape that is MAGA billionaire Elon Musk’s X are all behind the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024: “Brain rot.” The term—meaning “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging”—was announced Sunday as the victor of a public poll on six words chosen by a group of language experts at Oxford University Press, which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary. Usage of “brain rot” increased by 230 percent between 2023 and 2024, Oxford University Press said, as more and more people have observed the impact of being deluged with content online, from news to social media posts to streaming videos. While “brain rot” has taken on a new power, the term first appeared in Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 transcendentalist treatise on living in nature, away from the perils of the overwhelming then-modern world, when instead of poorly written MAGA tweets people’s brains were haunted by deftly-penned Edgar Allan Poe short stories.