On December 2, 2024 there is an article from Oxford University Press titled ‘Brain rot’ named Oxford Word of the Year 2024. But those two words are a phrase. We could either hyphenate them to brain-rot, or make a single a portmanteau word – brainrot. Another article by Casper Grathwohl about the Oxford Word of the Year has a section titled Celebrating 20 years of Oxford Word of the Year. There were six other years where they had two words:
2007: carbon footprint
2008: credit crunch
2010: big society
2011: squeezed middle
2019: climate emergency
2022: goblin mode
And there were two more with hyphenated words:
2006: carbon-neutral
2016: post-truth
A third article by Bill Chappell at NPR on December 2, 2024 is titled Writer Thoreau warned of brain rot in 1854. Now its’s the Oxford Word of 2024.
The terminal version of brain rot apparently is a ‘brain cloud.’ The Wikipedia page for the 1990 movie Joe Versus the Volcano describes it as follows (and see this YouTube video):
“Joyless, listless and chronically sick, Banks regularly visits doctors who can find nothing wrong with him. Finally, Dr. Ellison diagnoses an incurable disease called a ‘brain cloud’, which has no symptoms, but will kill him within five or six months.”
My cartoon was adapted from this one and that one at Openclipart.
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