By Tony Deyal
My son went to Oxford on a scholarship, and I used to joke about my own earlier visit there. I had gone for a meeting and was reading the dictionary in bed one night. But I didn’t finish. I got up to ‘P’. Then there was this thing with their special way of placing a comma in a list of three or more terms. In other words, instead of “Tom, Dick and Harry” they would write, “Tom, Dick, and Harry.”
This is why an Englishman was left as almost a total vegetable after being hit by a car, bus, tractor, and trailer. It was an Oxford Coma. Actually, after years of research, Oxford came up with two major things. The first was that its leading Oxonians finally developed a three-part questionnaire to help men understand if they were suffering from a middle-aged crisis: Life sucks? Job sucks? Wife doesn’t?
The other is an annual “Word of the Year” which was easy to understand until this year. Previously, in the last few years at least, there were words like “austerity” in 2015, “paranoid” in 2016, “homer” in 2022 and “hallucinate” in 2023. But then they stopped hallucinating after that. Last year it was “manifest” and if that was not enough for any man to ‘fess’ that he was not sure what that meant, this year they refused “Demure” for “Brain rot.”
I can understand “Demure” without a problem. My best example of “Demure” the merrier is when a young Chinese couple got married. In the hotel room that evening, the bride blushed demurely: “I am very shy. Please, husband, tell me what to do.” The husband, a gentle and thoughtful young man said: “Why don’t you tell me what you might like to do?” The blushing bride hesitated before replying: “Well … husband… I would like to try a … try a 69!” The husband was perplexed and asked, “But wife! This is our first night together and you want fried rice, beef and black bean sauce?” What I found very hard to understand, is that the Brits did not bother to consider the choice of “Dictionary.com” from Random House which went for “addle”.
I suppose that’s because it means “to become rotten or confused” and the Brits consider it too close for comfort. What was worse is that the famous Merriam-Webster, a trusted dictionary with “Word of the Day” and lots of wordplay, has ten words which they considered a defining 2024. What got to me and many others is that their best word for the year, “polarization”, was refused by the Brits. The reason, many of us believe, is that Merriam-Webster is “America’s Most Trusted Dictionary” and that would never ever do for the Brits.
I still think “polarization”, which means “division into two sharply distinct opposites” or “opposing extremes”, actually made the point about the Brits versus the Americans. But even so, any one of the other ten from Webster would have worked better than “Brain rot.” One I liked was “Barbicore”. As one young lady said, the word is really the core of Barbi. She said that a man who wanted to buy a doll for his niece for Christmas asked the salesperson if Barbie came with Ken and she replied, “Oh no! Barbie dates Ken but she comes with G.I. Joe.” Then there is “Bed roffing” or “the practice of spending many hours in bed during the day, often with snacks or a phone, so you can avoid burnout.”
One man was really upset that his girlfriend thought he was terrible in bed. He saw it as an unfair judgement to make in less than a minute. Another Webster word is “Girl dinner” which, for the bright nuclear radiation specialist, can be “fission chips”, but for the vegan it is just “peas and quiet”. The one that I would have used is “Bussin”. This is because it is straight from the USA where the capital city is also the place of most successful laundry businesses because they’re “washing tons”.
One of my other colleagues preferred “Vivacious” and told me the story of the new husband and wife. A small tourist hotel was all abuzz about an afternoon wedding where the groom was 95 and the bride was 23. The groom looked extremely feeble, and everyone felt that the wedding night would kill him. The bride was indeed a healthy, vivacious young woman.
What stunned everyone was that the next morning the bride came down the main staircase slowly, step by step, hanging onto the banister. She finally managed to get to the counter of the little shop in the hotel. The clerk looked really concerned, “Whatever happened to you, miss? You look like you’ve been wrestling an alligator!” The bride groaned, held on to the counter, and finally while crying said, “Oh God! He told me he’d been saving up for 75 years, and I thought he meant his money!” Obviously, in her case what was supposed to be funny, and money, had become “Brain rot”. Maybe that is why it became the Word of the Year.
According to the Brits, “Brain rot”, which includes doom-scrolling and social media addiction, is a modern condition familiar to most of them, or at least the 37,000 who with public commentary and analysis voted before their brains rotted. The Oxford University Press (OUP), defined “brain rot” as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of over-consumption or material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
What brought it so totally in the Brit limelight was that “brain rot” rose 230 percent for the year. One reason for this is that it demonstrates “a somewhat check self-awareness in the younger generations about the harmful impact of the social media that they’ve inherited. Just to let you know how far down the Brits are in the rot, some of the quintessential examples are “Riz”, “Skibbity”, “Yacht”, “Ohio”, “Phantom Tack”, “Mewing” and “Mogging”.
At this point, I packed up the rationale. I was not amused or a mews. For me, it is the same as the politics, politicians and parties preparing for elections within the next year. It is very much like what I call “a politician with half a brain”. The word is, “Gifted!” Or we can consider the prime ministers and what’s wrong with their brains. As my friend told me, “On their left side, there is nothing right, and on their right side there is nothing left.” Then he asked me, “What’s the difference between a politician’s brain and manure?” His response, “Tony, manure can be useful.” What I told him was, “Go easy on them. You know that Jellyfish have survived for 650 years despite not having brains. This gives me some hope, not much but a very slight hope, for politicians.”
* Tony Deyal was last seen talking about a politician who went to the doctor complaining about a brain tumour. The doctor told him that it was all in his head.
