YESTERDAY I RANTED ON ABOUT THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE versus purist democracy, tied loosely with “brain rot” being named Oxford’s Word of the Year. Today, we focus on this and its five also-rans.
OUP Word of the Year Methodology. Oxford writes, “Our language experts created a shortlist of six words to reflect the moods and conversations that have helped shape the past year. After two weeks of public voting [‘more than 37,000 people had their say’] and widespread conversation, our experts came together to consider the public’s input, voting results, and our language data, before declaring ‘brain rot’ as the definitive Word of the Year for 2024.”
Brain Rot 2024. Oxford University Press defines Brain Rot as “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. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”
OUP says, “The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.”
Its Origin. “The first recorded use of ‘brain rot,’ ” OUP says, “was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. In his conclusion, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: ‘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?’ ”
Image from Wikipedia.
Geez, and Thoreau didn’t even have wi-fi in his cabin.
Demure. Another Oxford candidate: “Demure,” reserved in appearance, not ostentatious. “A big increase in usage,” OUP says, “occurred after Jools Lebron used it in a short video on TikTok.”
Er… I missed this one. Indeed, I’ve missed all of TikTok (not in the sense of regret).
Dynamic Pricing. This is pricing that reflects market conditions. Two Swedish economists coined the phrase “dynamiska prisbilding” in their native language in 1927. Oxford credits kids’ concert tickets as a current example.
It may be only linguistically related to the mathematics of my Ph.D., dynamical systems theory. But it makes me wonder if Taylor Swift tickets would satisfy the theory’s axiomatic requirements.
Lore. OUP says this is a body of (supposed) facts, background information, and anecdotes. The word itself has been around for 1000 years. These days, Oxford says, it’s used as a gate-keeping behavior, as in “I know more than you do” among fans of celebrities.
Romantasy. This, not surprisingly, is a genre of literature combining romantic fiction and fantasy. It seems to have originated in 2008 when German Random House used it in promoting such products. Oxford notes, “Meanwhile, the popularity of the romantasy genre itself could perhaps be linked to an increased appetite for escapism to counteract widespread political and economic gloom.”
Yes, I know the feeling, though I don’t know that romantic fantasy would make me feel any better. Satire helps a lot.
Slop. This, OUP describes, is “art, writing, or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic, or inaccurate.” It says further, “In 2024 we have seen a 332-percent increase to refer specifically to material produced using a large language model (LLM), which is often viewed as being low-quality or inaccurate.”
Thanks, OUP. Indeed, were it my choice I’d have put “slop” and “brain rot” in a two-way tie. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024