There word of the year 2024 is actually made up of two words: brain rotwhich translated from English means “brain rot” or “brain rot” and describes «the alleged deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state as a result of excessive consumption of material (particularly online content) considered trivial or of little stimulating.” This was announced by theOxford University Presspublishing house of the very famous Oxford English Dictionary, which every year for twenty years has chosen the word (or neologism) that summarizes more than all the others the year that is about to come to an end. The word brain rot it also became famous because it was used as a hashtag on TikTok.
Why brain rot is the word of the year 2024
Submerged by myriads of low quality content that poison the brain, already at the beginning of the year more and more users felt the need to express discomfort in words, and so on the platform TikTok some reels of very young people had appeared who used the term “brain rot” to describe the moment in which they understood that their brain had broken down due to the excessive use of empty and meaningless content seen on social media. In these reels there were those who spoke of anomalous behaviour, such as having picked up the TV remote control thinking it was the telephone, or having used another object such as the touch screen of their device.
On the Chinese platform the use of this neologism has grown more and more over the months, and the frequency with which it has appeared is increasingly (up to 250%), and it is precisely for this reason that in the list of terms candidates for “word of the year” (demure, dynamic pricing, lore, romance And slop) emerged more than all the others.
A neologism that is not exactly new: it dates back to 1854
According to Oxford University Press, the neologism brain rot first appeared in the book “Walden” (1854) by the American philosopher Henry David Thoreauin which the author reflects on the connection with the natural world.
Among the pages of the book there is also space for a criticism of those who prefer simple explanations over complex ones, seen by the author as an indication of a decline in mental efforts, a symbol of common laziness that showed no sign of decreasing.
In particular, he mentioned “brain rot” in one passage:
England tries hard to cure potato rot, but no one tries to cure it brain rotwhich prevails more widely and fatally.
We reassure readers by saying that There is no evidence that “brain rot” is a real medical disorder and which should be taken simply as a term that describes how we feel when the brain is overloaded with contents that do not provide authentic stimuli.
