Janie B. Cheaney: What the Word of the Year says about us

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, December 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney now with a few thoughts on moving beyond the trivial.

JANIE B CHEANEY: By now you’ve heard, on this podcast and elsewhere, that the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year is “brain rot.” Which is actually two words, but no point in quibbling. It won its distinguished title through a combination of online voting from the public and language analysis by Oxford lexicographers. On its website, Oxford University Press defined the condition of brain rot as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” The material in question is primarily banal online content.

The word of the year is considered a cultural flag, and as such attracts comment from social observers. This year most of them passed along Oxford’s reference to Henry David Thoreau, who coined the term in his best-known work. Quoting Oxford:

‘Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort. In Thoreau’s words:“While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot . . . ?”’

I looked up the reference in the concluding chapter of Walden. It’s typical of Thoreau, plain-speaking mingled with obscure references and meandering thoughts that make the reader think, “Hey! Wait up while I figure out what you’re talking about.” Also the insufferable condescension of a man enjoying a two-year vacation with no wife and children to support. The paragraph in which brain rot occurs begins with this observation: “Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.” Thoreau also scorned newspapers and regarded the telegraph, the harbinger of mass communication, as trivial: why rush to connect Maine to Texas he asks…when Maine to Texas, “it may be, have nothing to communicate.”

Much of the commentary about today’s brain rot is similarly snarky, some of it connecting brain rot with MAGA. The truth is, much of life is consumed by trivia: daily to-do lists, shopping, eating, bed-making, laundry, et cetera ad infinitum. These are the threads that weave our lives into the lives of family and friends and church and school, the little lifts that propel us from one day to the next and on through the years.

But we can be choosy about the kind of trivia we consume. And we can carve out little daily Waldens for ourselves. One of my friends takes time to list 14 things she’s grateful for at the end of every day. Another contemplates a Psalm every morning. I watch my share of YouTube videos but also get up ridiculously early to think and pray and write. The noble, admirable, and excellent things Paul advises us to think about in Philippians 4 are ever at hand, and a little mindfulness can stave off a lot of brain rot.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

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