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Oxford's Word of the Year: 'Brain Rot'


"Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok?" asks the BBC. "If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year." It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content...

The first recorded use of brain rot dates much before the creation of the internet — it was written down in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden. The New York Times points out that Oxford's past "word of the year" selections included "podcast" and "selfie"[Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the company's dictionary division] noted the finalists were heavy on old-fashioned words that young people had repurposed in semi-ironic ways — the linguistic equivalent, he said, of "bell-bottoms coming back into fashion...." There was a spike of more than 300 percent over the past year in references not to pig feed, but to "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," according to Oxford.

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