2024's words of the year suggest that a 'supermajority' of online 'brats' may be experiencing 'brain rot.' 

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A word is dead, when it is said
Some say –
I say it just begins to live
That day

This gem of a poem by Emily Dickinson is a good place to start. Reading it draws attention to the nature of language and the use-it-or-lose-it principle that tends to shape a word's lifespan.

Some words—"lonely" and "critic," for example—were coined by William Shakespeare more than 400 years ago. Neither shows any sign of wear.

Some words are like brakes on a car: the more you use them, the sooner they wear out. Remember how awesome "groovy" once was?

According to the Global Language Monitor, the English lexicon comprises about a million words, A new one is coined every 98 minutes, but 47,156 words have fallen into disuse, the Oxford Dictionary estimates.

The list of obsoletes includes the long-gone "twattle," "gorgonize" and "groak." More recently, there are "pluto," the verb; "metrosexual," the noun; and "Barbenheimer," the hybrid portmanteau that launched a thousand memes—all of which seem to be on the decline.

It's a good time of the year to be messing around with words. The dark days of December bring the annual "best of" retrospectives—the past year's best movies, best albums, best books—which set the stage for word-related businesses to announce the Word of the Year (WOTY).

Each dictionary company chooses a preeminent word based upon "user data, zeitgeist and language," according to the Cambridge Dictionary. Some, like the Oxford Dictionary, permit word mavens a vote. The number of votes and lookups on a dictionary website provide user data.

However, charting the zeitgeist—the defining spirit of the times—is more art than science. Last summer, the zeitgeist took a celebratory turn, I thought. Dour MAGA Republicans were eclipsed by a presidential campaign based on joy rather than fear.

Then, in Utah, voters celebrated a rare win over the Legislature's conniving Republican supermajority. The Utah Supreme Court quashed a self-serving ploy to tighten their stranglehold on power by using deceptive wording as a tactic.

I expected "Swiftean" or "chatbot" to be a 2024 WOTY frontrunner. When neither made the grade, I turned to ChatGPT for an explanation. In my exchange with the machine, I asked it to name its WOTY. It offered "scrollpathy," a noun which the chatbot defined as "a sense of disconnection, exhaustion or apathy caused by excessive scrolling through digital content, often without meaningful engagement."

The definition evoked the 2023 American Dialect Society WOTY, "enshittification." The unflattering noun refers to the process by which a digital platform pursues profit by taking advantage of its user base.

I was surprised that "supermajority" showed up on Collins Dictionary's ten-word shortlist for the 2024 WOTY honors. But "brat," an adjective, bested the competition with a boost from the Charli XCX album, Brat. (And perhaps from "Brat Green," Pantone's color of the year.) To be brat is to be "characterized by a confident, independent and hedonistic attitude," the Collins website said. An exuberant tweet from Charli XCX—"Kamala is brat!"—turbocharged the adjective.

"Brain rot" made headlines last year. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed he had suffered brain problems caused by high levels of mercury. But it was a spike in usage that caused the Oxford Dictionary to choose "brain rot" as the WOTY. In making the announcement, Oxford wrote: "Our experts noticed that 'brain rot' gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media." Rounding out the Oxford shortlist were: "lore," "romantasy," "slop," and "demure."

A 1,200% increase in usage in 2024 landed "demure" in Dictionary.com's WOTY winner's circle. The dramatic increase has been attributed to influencer Jools Lebron's frequent use of the adjective to describe her makeup and clothing on TikTok.

The Cambridge Dictionary's choice of word of the year was "manifest," in part because it was looked up more than 125,000 times last year. Heretofore, the word's verb form has been used "to show something clearly through signs or actions." Last year, chiefly by way of social media, "manifest" took on a new definition, that is: "to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief doing so will make it more likely to happen."

"Polarization" was Merriam-Webster's WOTY. Who could be surprised given the divisive culture wars that churn endlessly? We live in a state of bifurcation—red and blue, left and right, Fox and MSNBC. At either diametric extreme, civility and empathy are as rare as a gift-wrapped book of poetry.

The words of a poet began this column; the words of a chatbot conclude it. Both invite a close reading of the 2024 words of the year and the zeitgeist that generated them. The annual December wordfest introduces repurposed words like "manifest" and "brat" alongside such newly minted ones as "enshittification."

In 1993, "information superhighway" was the WOTY. It was coined by Vice President Al Gore as an analogue for what came to be known as the internet. Just 30 years later, a prescient chatbot chose "scrollpathy" to point out how Gore's superhighway has become a source of disconnection, exhaustion and apathy.

Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionary, followed suit: "There's a sense that we are drowning in mediocre experiences as digital lives get clogged."

Brain rot, in other words.

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