While TikTok is still at risk going away, the app isn’t done giving us strange, viral entertainment. Take, for example, the “brain rot words list challenge.” Teens hand their guardians a list of the internet’s most cursed terms and film them being read aloud. To add stakes, the kids fill their cheeks full of water, then try not to spit it out laughing.
Videos of confused grannies trying to pronounce “skibidi” and moms barking “level 10 gyatt” attract hundreds of thousands of views. Commenters are elated at the chaos, given none of these parents have any idea what they are saying. If they did, they’d probably be a bit less nonchalant about their sound bites ending up on the internet.
My personal favorite is from a grandpa with a strong European accent in a bathrobe with over two million likes. After each incredibly odd pronunciation, the two kids spit water on each other, laughing. They’re like theme park water fountains, spraying the other with a saliva-filled splash. Their laughter is contagious, and you can’t help but find joy in the game. (Though when I showed my fiance, she just thought it was “dumb.”)
The Brain Rot Words List Challenge Highlights How Slang Is Changing
I’m unsurprised that parents have no idea what these words mean, let alone sound like. I felt old because I didn’t know that “hyperpigmentation” referred to a 2019 video where a young woman drew a not-so-flattering portrait of their mother.
But when I was younger, the internet slang mostly stemmed from the media we consumed. Times have changed. Outside of Twitch, I can’t remember the last time anyone has called someone a “noob.” Nobody under the age of 25 has said “fo shizzle” unironically.
But “l33tspeak” as it was once calle, was born out of the angriest gaming lobbies you can imagine. Snoop Dogg introduced us to “fo shizzle.” The content people on TikTok consume these days more fragmented and niche.
Accordingly, the language that’s evolved around it has also followed suit. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gen Alpha just starts mimicking goats or dial-up modems to truly get surreal someday.
The Unintentionally Dadaist Art of Zoomers
Brain rot memes are not meant to make sense. If you want to sound snooty, they can be compared to the Dada art movement of the early 20th century. Spawned from artists after World War 1, Dadaism rejected reason and logic. Instead, Dadaists favored pure absurdity with no rhyme or reason behind their function.
It is art for art’s sake, which you aren’t supposed to be able to understand. The same can be said for today’s brain rot meme vernacular.
The generation raised on TikTok has watched the world burn around them. Their schools become unsafe places. Their political leaders broke apart the social fabric that let their grandparents easily purchase homes on minimum wage jobs.
Like a urinal placed on its side, these turbo-charged phrases aren’t meant to invoke anything unless you are part of the group in on the joke.
As we grow older, slang will evolve and become more foreign. I think fondly of the episode of South Park where parent Randy Marsh thinks every song from today sounds like crap (literally) but refuses to admit it. Having parents embrace the meme is so much more enjoyable, even if they don’t understand it.
In these dark times where we have no idea who controls our feeds and the information we see, it’s nice to be fed a trend that’s entirely gleeful.
The internet is at its best when it brings us together, giving us a shared sense of community and knowledge that doesn’t punch down out of spite. I’d much prefer to watch a grandpa say “rizz” while teenagers laugh over whatever hate speech Elon Musk decided to post today.
