Sreyas Week 1: Who Gets the Joke?

 Over the summer my grandparents came over to visit us, but as soon as they came over, my sister went to Seattle for an internship. So for most of the summer, we didn’t really spend time as a full family. One weekend when my sister came back home, we decided to do a long-gone TikTok trend of asking our grandparents to say brainrot terms while we had water in our mouths, trying not to laugh.

Despite how ridiculously old and outdated the trend was, the amount of water spilled across the floor in the videos always seemed like a funny thing to try. However, we were supposed to stay clean, so my sister and I held bowls in front of us in the hopes that we wouldn’t spill anything (we still did). And while my grandparents were taking turns to say one word at a time, it became obvious how different the same language could sound depending on who was using it. 

Now it wasn’t a matter of accent or the different emphasis on syllables, but rather the meaning behind each word. I remember discussing with my sister on doing the trend with our parents, but they started learning about brainrot terms on their own, so we wouldn’t get that mispronunciation that made it funny either. My parents also tried their best to mix their language between regular English and Gen-Z English.

My mom regularly used the words “lowkey” and “sigma” on a daily basis, and I told her to stop multiple times, but of course, she didn’t. But it didn’t hold the same meaning as before, even if she was technically using the word correctly. That spark wasn’t there. 

That’s because of the shared culture and identity of Gen-Z. We learned these terms through viral videos and reels that were shared across multiple platforms or an increasing amount of people using it throughout school, not from some AI chatbot or some video that had supposedly cracked the code to brainrot meanings. Because the truth is brainrot terms never had real useful meanings. It was the interconnected nature of Gen-Z which made the true meanings of brainrot words that resulted in them being so widely used.