If you’re a Nebraskan, chances are your ZIP code has played a role in your being labeled “plain spoken,” a compliment about what some perceive as our native and natural custom to be clear, honest and forthright. Hey, as far as praise goes, we could do a lot worse … even those of us often accused as being anything but plain spoken.

My guess is that the frank and candid among us, Nebraskans and others, pay little or no attention to the annual Oxford University Press’ 2024 Word of the Year. This time, however, this version reflects our modern times and warns us of perhaps where we’re headed.

Such is the story of “brain rot,” this year’s winner, a rather indelicate noun defined by the linguists at the Oxford University Press 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. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.” In other words, effect and cause.

Criticizing The Internet

The Oxonians called out the World Wide Web — where the trivial and unchallenging are hot commodities — as the prime suspect in the advent of brain rot. To be fair, however, many WOTY winners can be trendy or esoteric picks for their popularity among the forward or the fashionable. Not so with brain rot. That’s because we’ve been here before, at least in this country. American naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau first used the term 170 years ago.

Writing in “Walden,” he took society to task as lazy thinkers who preferred simplistic, trifling ideas to substance and import, surely evidence, he argued, of a decline in the nation’s aggregate intellectual ability. He said, “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Still, Thoreau aside, the WOTY folks are on to something here. Even before the onslaught of recent election ads when we were bombarded with salvo after salvo of breathless innuendo and twisted logic, we have become accustomed — or worse, numb — to information that ranges from the nonsensical to the notorious. Too much of the online world (especially but not exclusively) is indeed wanting in value, heft and quality, to which I would add accuracy. Homages to the petty, the paltry and the piddling bring consequences for which now we have a name: brain rot.

Brain rot is attuned more to what has been a result of our behavior, unlike recent WOTY winners such a “rizz,” short for charisma and honored for its increase in popularity in 2023, and “goblin mode,” a paean to greed, sloppiness and sloth in 2022, both of which reflect our behavior. Consuming large amounts of drivel changes the “garbage in, garbage out” equation because brain rot indicates it doesn’t all get out.

Other Nominees

If you’re keeping score at home, the other nominees on the 2024 WOTY shortlist were “demure,” “dynamic pricing,” “lore,” “romantasy” and “slop.” I’ll let readers explore those meanings, although I would be remiss if I didn’t give a special shoutout to “slop,” a brain rot cousin that is often AI-generated language or ideas or information of low value, suspect quality or often simply wrong.

Brain rot, however, serves a dual purpose as pointed out by the Oxford University Press. The principals there argue that brain rot is both an effect and its cause, the fruit and the seed, because the word refers to our seeming insatiability in consuming low common denominators — a catalyst for and result of mental decline, both in individuals and in the aggregate. That is one tricky linguistic treachery.

While the WOTY underscores the potential danger of swigging informational swill as opposed to sipping it — or avoiding it altogether — the subject matter is neither new nor notable. Social scientists, psychologists, educators, parents and others for years have warned that without periodic and planned abstinence or at least moderation, screens and devices will undo our children. Brain rot, by definition, pays little attention to age, however. So whether we’re six or 60, the WOTY applies.

To be clear: The internet, with all its online wonders, is remarkable: a place to build communities, to connect, to communicate, to share ideas, beauty, humanity, even perhaps your soul, a platform for what could be a marketplace about what is best about us. But as the WOTY warns, when we instead settle for the least, the consequences can be serious. That should be plain to everyone.

This story was published by Nebraska Examiner, an editorially independent newsroom providing a hard-hitting, daily flow of news. Read the original article: https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2024/12/16/a-word-and-a-warning/

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