Zoomers, we have bad news: your six or seven minutes in the vanguard of the cultural zeitgeist are officially over. The New York Times has published a fresh guide to Gen Z slang. It’s all downhill from here.
The NYT’s guide is particularly notable for its insistence that a significant amount of today’s slang isn’t new at all. The paper is clearly wedded to this idea; in December last year, they insisted that the term “brain rot” should be attributed to Henry David Thoreau, who used it in his 1854 glamping memoir Walden. They’ve doubled down on this approach, reporting that the hot new slang among zoomers includes archaic words like “yap,” “skedaddle,” and (deep breath) “goon.”
Critics might argue that the NYT’s grasp of some cutting-edge slang isn’t quite as solid as it might like to believe: take, for example, its assertion that “Calling someone a ‘goon’ is no longer just a 1920s habit.” It feels somehow dirty to direct someone as venerable and respectable as the Gray Lady to the less salubrious parts of the internet, but… that ain’t how “goon” is being used in 2026, ma’am. (The paper of record doesn’t have an entirely flawless record on this front.)
The whole everything-old-is-new-again angle feels a little dubious, too. The article interviews one Brianne Hughes, a historical linguist: “Old terms often return subconsciously amid a sort of inventory-taking whenever a significant milestone arrives—like the turn of a decade or the anniversary of a cultural event. ‘It’s just a reason to go back through the old photos of the language, and being like, Oh yeah, I remember, that was pretty fun,’ Hughes said.”
It’d be interesting to know whether there are studies and research that support this view—none are cited—because intuitively, it seems perfectly feasible for a term as generic as “brain rot” to be coined in 2026 as it was in 1854, and that more generally, words and phrases are just as likely to be created anew over and over again as they are to re-emerge from some sort of linguistic deep freeze.
Does it even matter? Well, for our money, the process by which slang emerges, spreads, and is eventually re-subsumed into the blob of “proper” language is one of the most fascinating parts of linguistics. It’s a process one can track via Green’s Dictionary of Slang, an exhaustive dictionary of argot that, while not quite as venerable as the NYT, is pretty much the definitive source on its subject. As it happens, the entire dictionary has recently been made available in its entirety online for free, which is excellent news for anyone given to researching etymology for shits and giggles.
And what does Green’s have to say about “brain rot”? Nothing. The term is yet to appear in the slang dictionary of record, which suggests that Thoreau’s usage never quite made it out of the 19th-century skibidi toilet.
Read the full article here
