Right before bed, you flip open that English classic you had never heard of—at least, not until it was assigned to you. You begin to read, and you think that, perhaps, classics are not the slogs you once thought they were.

You slam into some trouble, though. Sentences run on for half a page, and your eyes lag behind. Why are words spelled like that? What does “dismal” even mean? One word you think you can infer. But your eyes meet the footer, and you simply do not understand word after word. So you shove aside your novel, your hands groping for your phone. TikTok is more digestible, anyway.

Or, rather, brain rot is. In 2024, Oxford named brain rot the Word of the Year. It is both the cause and effect of itself: the slump of a person’s mental state caused by the chronic consumption of online nonsense. If you spend your free time doomscrolling through TikTok, this should come as no surprise—over the past few years, brain rot and the social media app have become nearly synonymous. The former comprises videos and memes (or a mishmash of both) featuring Gen Alpha-coded words that are either meaningless (“skibidi,” whatever that means) or derivative (such as “rizz” originating from charisma). Yet, no matter how trivial this speech may seem, reflects a problematic trend: our language is deteriorating into linguistic slop.

Is the English language really worse than it was? Of course, linguistic evolution is natural. From Anglo-Saxon to modern English, many, many words have formed, disappeared, and changed their meaning. For example, in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 3, he queries, “Or who is he so fond will be the tomb / Of his self-love, to stop posterity?” We now understand “fond” to mean “affectionate.” In the 1500s, however, the word meant “foolish,” derived from the medieval word “fon,” which translates to “a fool.” Or consider the word “awful.” If you were amazed at a crimson sunset, you might have been awful in Shakespearean, as in full of awe. Now, you may be called awful if you nab the last chocolate chip cookie in the jar.

Semantic change usually makes sense in any language. However, the Internet has accelerated the pace of these changes, especially via the monolith of TikTok. Its trends rapidly spread, and within hours, they pop up on our cell phones. Millions of TikTok audio and meme templates flood into social media every year, influencing our speech as we consume. Anything under the sun can go viral: TikToks range from a distorted shout of “What the hell?” to low-brow humanoid toilets. Chuckling to ourselves, we parrot what we see to our peers, and in just a few weeks, we as a generation oversaturate words like “demure” and “brat” until they lose their novelty. Words are dubbed as unfashionable faster than ever.

While brain rot language can be funny, its implications are more sinister. Algorithms curate an echo chamber of videos you “heart” and watch for more than a few seconds. Content creators imitate each other, and soon, every video you watch repeats the same absurdist comedy. If this is all the content we consume, our vocabulary will shrink as we repeat the same twenty conversational words or struggle to articulate an argument on the go. We will stumble on our path toward eloquence if we are not mindful of our aggregate media consumption—the greatest influence on our speech.

Nothing is inherently wrong with brain rot (besides being an irritant, depending on the person). But we must ensure that we preserve our rhetoric in some way. Reading books while keeping a dictionary handy can render classics more accessible and widen your lexicon. Whenever you reach a word you cannot define, search it up! Especially vivid verbs, which are the most practical to remember. If you want a break from books and TikTok, crossword puzzles may sharpen your vocabulary, too. They often teach me words and phrases I have never heard of (praise to the New York TimesOn the cusp of adulthood, we must value how we speak, lest we devolve into the very individual we satirize. English is a rich language that deserves justice through our appreciation.