From “Rizz” to “Brainrot”: Internet Slang Changes English

My roommate asked me to pass the remote last Tuesday, and I said, "It's giving lazy." She laughed. My fifty-year-old uncle visited last weekend, and when I said the same thing about a movie we watched, he stared at me like I had spoken Mandarin. That gap between her instant understanding and his total confusion shows how internet slang now divides English speakers by generation and online habits more than by geography. Words like "rizz," "brainrot," and "no cap" spread through social media in weeks, create entire grammars that traditional dictionaries cannot track, and fade before linguists finish studying them.

This constant churn is not just teens being silly online. Internet slang is restructuring how English evolves, who controls that evolution, and what it means for a word to be "real." The speed and creativity of online language reveal both the resilience of English and the new fractures forming inside it.

I first noticed this shift during my sophomore year when my linguistics professor assigned us to track one slang term's origin. I chose "bussin" because I had been saying it for months without knowing where it started. The research surprised me. The word existed in African American Vernacular English for decades, then TikTok pushed it into mainstream youth vocabulary in 2021. By the time I wrote my paper that fall, "bussin" had already peaked and was being replaced by newer terms. That assignment taught me that internet slang is not a separate language but a rapid-cycling version of the same processes that have always shaped English. The difference is velocity. What used to take years now takes weeks, and the internet gives us a written record of every step.

The mechanics of how internet slang spreads explain why it feels so different from earlier shifts in English. Traditional slang moved through physical communities: a neighborhood, a school, a subculture. You learned it from people you saw regularly. Internet slang spreads through algorithms. A fifteen-year-old in Ohio posts a video using "rizz" to describe charm or charisma. The platform shows it to ten thousand strangers. A few use the word in their own videos. Within days, millions of young people recognize the term, even if they have never met anyone who says it aloud. This algorithmic distribution creates slang that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. I can use "brainrot" to describe low-quality addictive content with friends at school, but my cousin two states away might have never heard it. The internet connects us while fracturing our shared vocabulary into countless micro-dialects defined by which corners of the web we inhabit.

The creativity of internet slang also challenges traditional ideas about how words should work. English teachers spent years telling me that sentences need subjects and verbs, but "it's giving" functions as a complete grammatical unit meaning "it conveys the vibe of." When I described that mediocre movie to my uncle as "giving C-list production," I used a construction that makes no sense in standard English but carries precise meaning in internet vernacular. "Brainrot" similarly packs complex cultural commentary into one term. It describes not just bad content but the specific exhaustion of consuming endless disposable media, the feeling of your attention span dissolving into mush. My generation invented these terms because we needed language for experiences that did not exist before. Standard English had no word for the charm specifically displayed in flirting, so someone coined "rizz" from "charisma." These are not corruptions of proper language but expansions of what English can express.

Some linguists worry that internet slang's speed prevents it from developing the stability that makes language useful. If words change meaning every six months, how can we communicate across time? I felt this tension last month when I tried explaining a meme to my parents using slang from two years ago. They did not understand the old terms, and I had half-forgotten them myself. The rapid turnover does create a kind of linguistic amnesia. Yet I also notice that some internet slang stabilizes and spreads beyond youth culture. "Ghosting" is now in Merriam-Webster. My economics professor said "low-key" in lecture without irony. These terms succeeded because they named something real that standard English expressed clumsily. The constant generation of new slang might be how English finds the few terms worth keeping. Most die quickly, but the useful ones survive and enrich the language.

What strikes me now, a year after that linguistics assignment, is how internet slang makes me conscious of language as a living choice rather than a fixed system. I code-switch constantly. In class, I write "charisma." Texting friends, I write "rizz." Talking to my parents, I avoid both and just describe someone as charming. Each choice signals who I am in that moment and which community I am addressing. That is exhausting sometimes, but it is also powerful. I control my relationship to language rather than language controlling me. The internet did not invent slang or linguistic change, but it made both visible and fast enough that I cannot pretend English is stable. I am watching my native language shift in real time, and I am part of making it shift. That feels both unsettling and strangely democratic, as if we are all finally admitting that the people who speak a language are the ones who own it.

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