The word of the year for 2024, per one major dictionary, was "brain rot." Not a crisis of democracy, not inflation, not the fires—brain rot.
The fact that a phrase describing the mushification of our minds won an award for capturing the cultural moment is either the most honest thing to happen all year or the final symptom of the disease itself.
I keep thinking about what dictionaries used to be.
A schoolhouse rite of passage: look it up, write the definition, learn that words have edges.
Now the dictionary is an app nobody opens, and the definitions arrive pre-chewed by algorithms that decided meaning is whatever gets the most engagement.
Consider what's happened to basic words. "Literally" now means figuratively. "Gaslighting" means any disagreement. "Fascist" means a coworker who asked you to use the shared calendar. "Violence" now includes speech. "Safety" now includes silencing people.
We aren't just losing precision—we're losing the ability to describe reality to each other, which is the thing a shared language is for.
That was its whole moral authority: here is what the word means, now we can proceed.
Today you can look up the same word on the same website and get a definition that reads like a press release from a political faction.
Merriam-Webster has updated entries to reflect "modern usage" so aggressively that the dictionary now trails the internet instead of anchoring it.
Ask a teenager to define "justice" or "freedom" and you'll get a slogan, not a sentence.
They've been taught to feel words rather than define them, which means they can be moved by anyone who deploys the right vocabulary.
Contracts get signed by people who can't parse them.
Court rulings read like they were written to be misinterpreted on purpose.
When words mean anything, they mean nothing, and when they mean nothing, whoever shouts loudest gets to decide what they meant.
We did this to ourselves, one lazy tweet at a time.
Every time we let "problematic" stand in for an actual argument, or let a company redefine "recession" until it fits the news cycle, we sanded another layer off the language.
It just accumulated, like clutter, until the house stopped being livable.
It was an agreement: we will mean the same things when we speak.
Breaking that agreement doesn't make us free.
It makes us easy to sell to, easy to scare, and impossible to govern ourselves.
A society that can't agree on what words mean can't agree on what's true, and a society that can't agree on what's true will eventually agree on a strongman to tell it.
Final Thoughts
It's a warning label, and we taped it to the fridge like a child's drawing instead of reading it.