“I am Hugo, and I’m pretty sure I’m the first ever person in my family to get my brain rotted,” says Hugo Lee, a nine-year-old student at Lion’s Club International School in Tin Shui Wai.
It might sound odd to boast about having a rotten brain, but Hugo and his classmate, 10-year-old Jesswin Kerung, proudly compete to list as many slang words as possible. They rattle off words that parents of toddlers and young teens may already know: “skibidi”, “rizz”, “negative aura”, and the hottest slang at the time of writing – since there seems to be something new every other day – “6 7”.
Older generations struggling to keep up with new lingo is nothing new. Back in 1992, the LA Times published “List Solves Mystery of Teen Slang”, pandering to parents and teachers of Gen X and young millennials baffled by their children’s evolving dialects.
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Now, those very Gen Xers and millennials rely on articles like this one to decode their kids’ speech. Born between 2010 and 2024, the eldest Gen Alpha kids came into the world alongside iPads and Instagram. Growing up fully immersed in technology, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic when they were stuck at home glued to screens, it’s no surprise that these so-called “iPad kids” have developed a hyper-online way of speaking which older Gen Zers and millennials often jokingly refer to as “brain rot”.
Oxford University Press named “brain rot” its Word of the Year in 2024, defining it as “a perceived loss of intelligence or critical thinking skills due to consuming unchallenging or silly content”. Gen Z and Gen Alpha often use the term humorously and self-deprecatingly to describe their exposure to low-value online content and its effects.
Internet savvy Gen Alpha children are peppering their language with ever more colourful – and confusing – slang terms. Photo: Shutterstock
The phenomenon of brain rot is believed to stem from the popular term “skibidi”, which is credited as the first slang exclusive to Gen Alpha. It goes back to an animated YouTube series called “Skibidi Toilet” created by Alexey Gerasimov (username DaFuq!?Boom!) in February 2023. The show features a surreal war between toilets with human heads and humanoid characters with device heads. These bizarre videos quickly went viral among Gen Alpha. To date, there are 79 episodes, some of which have racked up over 211 million views.
