As the new school year starts, fresh “brainrot” terms are popping up, and students are laughing at random phrases that leave teachers totally confused.
If you’re not sure what “brainrot” means, it’s basically when something is so random, cringe, or weird that it becomes funny because it’s not funny. It’s like the joke is so dumb that it feels like it’s “rotting” your brain.
New brainrot shows up almost every month, and it’s always completely random. However, knowing too much about it might get you called “terminally online,” which means someone spends way too much time on the internet so much that it’s kind of unhealthy. People who aren’t terminally online are usually adults or people with jobs and responsibilities.
Because brainrot spreads among kids, middle schoolers, and high schoolers, teachers get exposed to it the most. But even though they’re around students all day, they usually have no clue why their class is laughing. Most of the time, students won’t explain the joke. Not because it’s inappropriate, but because they know the teacher won’t find it funny.
Humor is drastically different between generations. A teacher probably wouldn’t laugh at the numbers “6-7,” but students will. If you’re an adult, you’re probably wondering, “Why is 6-7 funny?”
The answer comes from the song Doot Doot by Skrilla, which many people think sounds terrible. The music video features basketball player LaMelo Ball, who happens to be 6’7”. At first, the meme wasn’t that big. But it blew up after a video of a kid at a basketball game yelling “6-7” went viral. The kid had what’s jokingly called an “ice-cream scoop haircut” and looked like a stereotypical “Mason” (basically a white teen with that haircut). Ever since, hearing “6-7” has made students burst out laughing. So, when a teacher accidentally says it during class, students begin to laugh.
Another brainrot word is “mustard,” which started with Kendrick Lamar’s Drake diss track “Not Like Us.” At the start of the song, the producer Mustard’s name is shouted quietly. Later, on Kendrick’s album GNX, in the song “tv off,” Mustard’s tag is yelled for almost five seconds straight. TikTok ran with it. Suddenly, normal videos would cut to loud audio and a picture of Kendrick Lamar whenever “mustard” was mentioned.
Then there’s “mango.” A phonk artist named LDRR! released a song called mangos, where he repeats the word three times. TikTok grabbed it and turned it into a joke. Just like Mustard, people would make normal videos that instantly switched to loud audio and Kendrick Lamar the second “mango” played, even though Kendrick has nothing to do with the song.
Another old song, AJR’s 2015 track Thirsty, resurfaced recently and became a meme. AJR is often roasted by Gen Z for making “bad songs,” so TikTok has been clowning on Thirsty. They’re either playing it in the background for laughs or pretending to hype it up sarcastically.
One brainrot moment didn’t come from a popular song, rather it came from a performance of the musical Newsies. In a viral clip, an actor sings “a barbershop haircut that costs a quarter” way louder than everyone else. People started making absurd edits where his loud singing “destroys” the building or universe. This led to a flood of fake reviews for a real place called Adrian’s Barbershop, connecting it to the meme. Some people even visited the barbershop just to make jokes.
Why Adrian’s Barbershop? It ties back to another viral clip. A cringey TikTok video of three high schoolers where one says, “Adrian, explain our friend group.” This has been making rounds on TikTok for a while. The video is so awkward that it’s become impossible to watch without laughing from cringeness. That’s why Adrian’s Barbershop is suddenly a running gag (some people have crossed the line into harassment).
The last brainrot term here is “Steven here.” This one comes from a 2023 Ring camera video where a man approaches a doorbell camera, says, “Steven here, I’m looking for Fifi,” and then insists he “knew it was a scam” when the homeowner says Fifi doesn’t live there. The clip went viral, and now people randomly repeat “Steven here” just because it’s so out of context.
So, when you hear teens or kids laughing at random words, don’t take it personally. They’re not laughing at you. It’s probably just brainrot they saw online. You might’ve accidentally said one of their “keywords.”
To keep up with brainrot, you’d have to “doomscroll” TikTok or Instagram. Medical News Today defines doomscrolling as “spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of news or other content online, especially negative news.”
According to Nationwide Children’s Hospital, too much doomscrolling and brainrot can be harmful for kids. It can lower attention spans, hurt critical thinking, expose them to misinformation, cause emotional fatigue, lead to social isolation, and even cause physical problems like headaches.
If you have a young child who’s always online, it might be a good idea to delete some apps or set screen time limits to protect them from these effects. For teens, though, that’s harder. Teens usually know how to bypass restrictions, so if you don’t want your kid to grow up glued to brainrot, set rules now, before they figure out the workarounds like today’s teens have.