The Oxford University Press has chosen its word of the year, one word that's been popularized on social media: “brain rot.”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines Brain Rot as the deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, because someone consumes material considered to be trivial.
According to Oxford, the use of the term rose by 230% in just the last year.
Brent Henderson is the chair of the linguistics department at the University of Florida.
He said language always changes and develops through younger generations, and that the word "brain rot" will likely stick around.
"First of all, social media is not going anywhere. And then secondly, you know, it's the kind of term that you just, you almost know exactly what it means just by hearing it. That's not the case with other words,” Henderson said.
He said words like brain rot that come from social media are a positive because it creates a culture that goes beyond borders. But in the long run, he fears there's a chance this spread in social media slang could erase already endangered languages.
“One of the things that we face globally right now is a global language endangerment crisis, where thousands of languages around the world are in danger of disappearing in this century,” he said. “Young people in those cultures are growing up speaking, you know, English or Spanish or languages that have a little more global, political and economic power, and not necessarily learning the language of their parents.”
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