Reading newsletter #12: Brainrot, enshittification, demure, brat, manifest, and words of 2024
Things that I paid attention to, you should pay attention to, and that got my attention.
Brainrot. (noun) It refers to the supposed deterioration of our mental and intellectual state caused by spending too much time consuming (or watching) low-quality content that is trivial and unchallenging.
Example: “I have been watching too many Instagram Reels daily #brainrot.”
According to the Oxford University Press (OUP), brainrot is the word of 2024. As you can tell, brainrot is part of the growing Internet slang, just like doomscrolling, TL;DR, FOMO, OOTD, Photobomb, and my favorite, N00b.
Since the Internet was invented, new words have emerged. If you want to search for something online, google it. If you want someone to chat you up privately, you tell them to DM you. If you want to relax and park your brain, you would likely go “netflix and chill.”
I have spent much of my tech journalism years deciphering Internet language. Back then, I described hack or hackers as intelligent people solving technological problems using computers. Today, hackers refer to people or groups of individuals who use social engineering to make you part with your money. They are deemed cybercriminals who have malintent.
Lexicographers from Oxford chose brainrot because it reflected the language of our world in the last 12 months. It is the word people use on the web to describe what they experienced after consuming endless hours of TikTok videos or Reels, Instagram content, and online chatter from toxic platforms acting as echo chambers.
Thanks to overflowing low-quality yet sticky content, people, including me, pass the time by consuming it for hours until we fall asleep. The biggest trigger of this act—at least for me—is boredom; for the young ones, it’s a quick dose of entertainment while on break from a mundane task.
A person suffering from brainrot can be spotted whenever they talk. Their vocabulary is mainly derived from today’s Internet lingo. An article in the New York Times said:
“One of the easiest ways to tell if someone’s brain has been destroyed by social media is to notice how often they reference internet jargon,” the influencer Joel Cave recently posted in a TikTok. “The fact that the internet can infiltrate our brain so much that people don’t even have control over what they’re saying — they just have to spout out whatever meme they’ve been seeing a lot — is crazy to me.”
Brainrot results from mindlessly scrolling (er, doomscrolling) through content on your smartphone. Much of this content is called “snackable content,” so we refer to this act as “consuming” rather than watching a video or looking at photos on social media.
The term brainrot appeared in Henry David Thoreau’s novel, Walden, in 1854. He defines brain rot as people's tendency to devalue complex ideas, leading to the general decline of mental and intellectual effort.
TL;DR: younger people would rather have a steady diet of trivial and unchallenging activities (like consuming online content) than, say, reading a book.
Oxford’s choice of word of the year reflects “cultural shifts” in our society. It also shows how much of our cyber world (coined in the 1980s) permeates our real-life world, including language and behavior.
Demure, manifest, and other invented Internet words
Brainrot is not the first of recently Internet-reinvented words attracting lexicographers’ attention.
We have seen people use the word “demure” to describe something else other than its original meaning: reserved, modest, or shy. Lifestyle and TikTok creator Jools Lebron popularized the phrase “very demure, very mindful” to exhibit quiet modesty, contrasting loud expressions of fashion, beauty, and self on social media. The Guardian wrote:
How does one behave demurely, you ask? First, stay presentable at work. “I’m very modest, I’m very mindful,” Lebron says in one TikTok. “The way I came to the interview is the way I go to the job. A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure.”
Other words worth mentioning are manifest, enshittification, and brat.
According to Internet slang, manifest describes a spiritual practice involving positive thoughts, beliefs, and emotions to bring about change in your life. People believe manifesting something means you can will things into your life by thinking hard enough.
Then, enshittification is “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”
That’s a mouthful of an explanation. Initially coined by tech writer Cory Doctorow, enshittification is applied to companies providing high-quality service to attract users. However, these companies slowly degrade features and user experience to focus on making more profit from advertising.
Facebook has suffered enshittification as the platform focuses on attracting eyeballs (and advertisers), thereby deprioritizing user experience for profit. This also applies to streaming services reducing content quality or search engines prioritizing sponsored results over organic ones.
The Macquarie Dictionary selected enshittification as its word of the year because it has been observing the decline of quality content as things go digital.
Tired and wired words
I remember this little section in Wired magazine, which features a table of “tired” and “wired” words in every issue. Tired words are terms they feel should be retired from everyday speech or communication, while wired words are cool terms worth the ink on a glossy magazine.
Here’s a sample of a list of tired words (at least according to me):
Cyberspace
Nerd
Blog
Social network
Boob Tube (yup, this is what we called our television)
Here’s a list of wired words:
AI
Dork/Geek (this is back)
Lit
(Ok) Boomer!
Flex
If you notice, these words are also generational, meaning a slang word evolves from the language of a generation. Gen-Zs have a unique collection of words they invented.
When we were teenagers, we also had our own set of slang. There were “awesome,” “dude,” “radical,” “duh,” “bogus,” “airhead,” and other terms that may have evolved from that time. When we had to leave, we “bounced” or “split.” We don’t say “cool” every time. We say that’s awesome, or it’s excellent! When we need to say yes, we just say “word.” And who could forget glam to mean glamorous?
Today, there are compilations of Internet slang that could be as thick as a dictionary—the printed kind. Hubspot has one here.
As writers, we are taught to avoid slang and stick to the words we use daily. Simple English words will do to express ourselves. For now, I feel that this newsletter slaps, or should I say, bussin.
