High school hallways sound like a mashup of TikTok comment sections and inside jokes nobody remembers starting. People act loud at seven in the morning yelling “six, seven” for no reason, call each other “chuzz,” and casually drop words like “dwerk” that make zero sense unless you’re fluent in brainrot. Even the English teachers are lost, parents have given up, and honestly half of the school is probably just pretending to know what everyone’s saying so they don’t look clueless.

Our language is evolving, devolving, and brain-rotting at the same time…and honestly, who’s mad at it?

According to an article written by Melinda Wang for The Oracle, “‘Rizz’ was crowned as the word of the year in 2023 by Oxford University Press… It comes from the word ‘charisma’ and is used to indicate a high-level proficiency in flirting with someone.”

It’s not just rizz though. Words come from TikTok, memes, AAVE (African American Vernacular English), friend groups, or literally nowhere. Some stick for while, some die in less than a week. But if you get it, you get it, and if you don’t, you don’t.

“I feel like we’re going to talk the same when we’re older, but the mindset is just going to stay with us… that’s how we’re growing up,” freshman Adrian Osorio said.

Using slang isn’t about trying, it’s just how everyone speaks. If you screw up you stick out, but get it right and it just feels normal. If you were to say “Adrian, explain our friend group” to someone who isn’t very media literate, you’re getting weird stares.

“I had to explain skibidi to my dad, and now he uses it all the time,” freshman Khloe Smith said, “so he tries to make fun of me for it.”

It spreads fast. One week it’s “aura,” the next it’s “John pork.” Miss it because you are employed and weren’t scrolling? You’re behind.

According to a student responding to a survey conducted by the College of William and Mary, “TikTok and other social media popularized these terms and have turned them into universal vernacular when it’s supposed to be African American vernacular.”

When the teachers and parents try to use it? Painful. Everybody has to reload their fake laughs for when the teacher says the assignment is skibidi or to “stop rizzing up your partner and get to work.”

“I don’t really get how someone can be brain-rotted, because you can still use slang and not be brain-rotted, but some people use it incorrectly, and that makes them sound stupid,” senior Cayla Ross said.

Nobody really realizes it, but slang is a huge part of our daily lives. There are so many things we say that we don’t realize have been chewed up and spit out into new words a million times over. Our slang is really dumb, messy, funny, and sometimes confusing, but it’s ours and we’ll probably just talk like this forever.

“Language is rich after all,” Nicholas Graham (the oracle, idk how to title him) said. “Slang is wonderfully creative, wonderfully inventive. It can also be almost like a secret code.”