A long time back, I saw a meme on Reddit about how the amount of words a language has for something is indicative of how important that thing is to a culture. The particular case highlighted was the sixteen words the ancient Romans had for “young male prostitute” (more words than Eskimos have for ‘snow’), which indeed correlates with the widespread presence of them in Roman society. Although this joke is a bit vulgar for a semi-formal blog post, and the meme was linguistically inaccurate (among other issues, some of the words were adjectives and not specific to just prostitution), it’s still funny and also a surprisingly good entry point for discussing the English language today. What ideas, concepts, or things are becoming increasingly important in society nowadays, necessitating the creation of more words for them? The first few ideas that come to my mind are the decay of the internet (‘enshittification’) and the worsening of political discourse (‘gaslighting’), but the most obvious winner for “category of word rapidly rising in importance and quantity” is brainrot.
Brainrot is by its very nature meant to not have meaning, which makes it feel counter-intuitive to seek a link between brainrot and a larger trend of certain things gaining importance in society. However, it is precisely this quality of meaninglessness in speech that has been rising, and the increase in brainrot words is symptomatic of that.
Before beginning the actual analysis, a summary is needed of what brainrot even is, for non-Gen Z readers or those who’ve luckily not been exposed to this monstrosity. Merriam-Webster defines it as “shallow or addictive online content,” but this doesn’t quite capture how it works since it focuses on social media content rather than the words and speech patterns derived from it. The process usually looks something like this. In 2025, the rap song “Doot Doot (6 7)” was released and started going viral online because it was used in basketball youtube shorts, especially in videos with tall players like LaMelo Ball who is 6 feet and 7 inches tall (thus ‘6-7’). The meme became part of Gen Z and Gen Alpha culture as a whole, rather than just basketball, after a video of a 12-year-old shouting ‘6-7’ went viral 1. Since then, it’s become (by my estimation) the most famous and widely used slang in Gen Z and Gen Alpha. How do people use it, you ask? Here are some particularly interesting explanations
Aspen Bohlander, 15, estimated that she hears “6-7” around 80 times a day. “It’s more of an ironic thing,” said Bohlander, a sophomore at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Oak Park, Ill. “People are making fun of the fact that it’s not funny.” 1
The ridiculousness and pointlessness of “67” is perhaps why it has succeeded so extravagantly as a meme, breaking out of the classroom to become Word of the Year 2
In summary, you can say ‘6-7’ at any point in a conversation, with zero context to trigger it, and you will be met with a chorus of sycophants screaming ‘6-7’ with you and performing the accompanying hand gesture. It isn’t even meant to be funny, as some people are acknowledging despite still saying it 24/7. Sounds pretty stupid, right? It is, and it’s part of a wider problem of people replacing actual conversation content with meaningless brainrot to obscure the fact that they don’t have anything meaningful to say.
Some people will dismiss ‘6-7’ and similar brainrot (there are many such words out there) as kids being kids, just having fun, a harmless trend. However, there are a few key differences that separate today’s brainrot from earlier generations’ harmless inside jokes. The first is that brainrot just isn’t funny. Every generation has had its own ‘low-brow’ humor, e.g. laughing any time the product ‘23x3’ appears or an opportunity arises to say “that’s what she said,” but these earlier jokes were different because there was at least a certain trigger necessary for the word/phrase to be said, and its meaning was associated with that trigger. Some thought and meaning were tied to “that’s what she said” – sure, a few people would really try to twist words’ meanings to give random sentences a dirtier meaning, but there was at least some thought put into the jokes. Similarly, you’d only laugh if the number ‘69’ actually appeared somewhere – nobody would randomly shout ‘69’ and trigger a bout of laughter among their friend group. Today’s brainrot, on the other hand, requires no thought or meaning, and you can shout ‘6-7’ or ‘sigma’ at any time and trigger laughter. This is the key difference between earlier low-brow humor and today’s brainrot: the lack of thought or meaning in our speech is worse today than ever before.
The other worrying trend is that ‘6-7’ isn’t a supplement to normal intelligent conversation where people act a bit silly in their down-time. It’s become a way of avoiding meaningful conversation entirely, where teenagers’ hangouts don’t involve conversations about books, movies, or even gossip about their own lives, so much as it’s an endless stream of internet brainrot. I’ve heard many conversations where absolutely nothing meaningful is said, not even real-life gossip, and it’s just an exchange of various brainrot words and phrases. Interestingly, there is a strong correlation between not reading long-form content (i.e. anything longer than the text in Youtube Shorts videos) or watching good films (i.e. not “Superman” or “The Minecraft Movie”) and the tendency to use brainrot. People who consume interesting, meaningful media have real content to talk about and don’t have to resort to ‘6-7’ to hide that they have nothing valuable to say. In this way, brainrot is a manifestation of a broader trend of the average person’s media consumption becoming increasingly inane, and human speech correspondingly growing poorer in intellectual content.
Aside from the stupidity of entire conversations where nothing meaningful is said, this is also a worrying amount of control that inane Youtube Shorts trends are having over our lives. I’ve been noticing for a while that teenagers’ hangouts increasingly don’t involve gossiping, gaming, or even vandalizing bathrooms together (at least that had a social aspect), but just 10 people sitting in a circle and watching Youtube Shorts without earphones – does the cacophony of all the videos playing together enhance the experience? – and not even finishing entire Shorts, watching 5 seconds of one video before scrolling to the next. When people are on their own, there isn’t even a contest between bathroom vandalism and Youtube Shorts – every waking moment is spent on one of the three main platforms (Youtube Shorts, Tiktok, Instagram Reels), mindlessly scrolling through the most inane content. And now, even human conversation has been taken over by the culture of meaninglessness that short-form video content promotes. Note that brainrot words are essentially a result of the algorithms pushing certain videos to virality and thus making brainrot words/phrases go mainstream; no longer do people choose their own words associated with individual thoughts and deliberately-chosen meanings – now, even speech is an extension of the control that the algorithms have over our minds. When the algorithms have this much control over our culture, even to the point of controlling how we talk, I refuse to believe the trends are still harmless fun – it’s taken on a distinctly dystopian quality now.
I’ve been talking about these issues for a long time, but my concerns are usually dismissed. People with an interest in linguistics often accuse me of linguistic prescriptivism, and a more common phrasing is ‘elitism.’ The charge of elitism is nonsensical – it isn’t just elites who have an interest in people’s minds being independent from corporate-run algorithms’ control (often elites wish the exact opposite), and human speech retaining intelligence and meaning, these things should be everyone’s concern. However, the accusation of linguistic prescriptivism is a bit more interesting. I certainly am guilty of linguistic prescriptivism – but is that such a bad thing? Many thinkers have criticized the rhetoric of fascism, e.g. the creation of ‘us vs them’ mentality and use of racial/religious/etc slurs, but this is never labeled linguistic prescriptivism or criticized as such. While brainrot isn’t quite as dangerous as fascist rhetoric, I am making a similar argument about the social good derived from people thinking before speaking and attributing meaning to words, which I don’t think is a harmful mode of linguistic prescriptivism. The concept carries a negative connotation because prescriptivism is often employed by cultural chauvinists seeking to standardize the use of a language to exclude words derived from indigenous languages, or slang used by marginalized groups; while this specific form of linguistic prescriptivism is harmful, I think there are plenty of productive and morally correct ways of judging the relative merits of different styles of speech, and how they impact society.
This post isn’t meant to be anti-fun or looking down my nose at people who like Youtube Shorts. Meaningless trends can often be fun, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, the degree to which short-form videos are shaping our culture and depriving it of intellectual depth is worrying. Brainrot’s omnipresence in Gen Z speech and culture is a symptom of larger issues: corporate algorithms controlling our thoughts and speech, the inane media consumption of the average person, and the increasing rarity of discourse on socially important or intellectually enriching topics. If we want the English language to continue being a vessel for conveying meaningful thoughts, we must acknowledge brainrot speech as a threat to the intellectual life of younger generations.
Sources I quoted from and got background information from: