"While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?"

Wrote Henry David Thoreau, quoted in "Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year Is… Brain Rot" (NYT).

Thoreau published that sentence in 1854 — it's in "Walden" — but somehow, 170 years later, his word/phrase is the official Word of the Year. I'm just going to guess that Thoreau would consider choosing a word of the year to be a rotten-brain activity. 

Is this word-of-the-year-choosing "Oxford" really the same as the Oxford English Dictionary? The NYT says it's "the publisher of the august Oxford English Dictionary," but I look up the word in the OED, and I get:

Did you mean?

• brown rot

• brain-box

• brainbrat

• brain fog

• brain-lit

"Brainbrat"? That reminds me of last summer's word "brat," as in "Kamala Harris is brat." Ugh. That's all memory-holed now, I suppose. What's "brainbrat"? It's like "brainchild," but less well-behaved.

Here's the Thoreau, in context, to un-rot your brain and maybe inspire you to make some new observations about the brain-rot of 2024 American culture:

Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.

No one told you there would be no math. 

Some would find fault with the morning red, if they ever got up early enough. "They pretend," as I hear, "that the verses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas"...

Sunrise and an Indian poet from the 15th century. ("Kabir suggested that 'truth' is with the person who is on the path of righteousness, who considers everything, living and non living, as divine, and who is passively detached from the affairs of the world.") Back to Thoreau:

... but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admit of more than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally? I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds.

Potatoes, ice, blueness.... 

The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

Purity... 

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?

Big and small (my favorite tag)...

Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Ah! The different drummer. We stumble into a most-famous passage. This is like my experience with the "sunlit uplands" earlier today. 

brain-rot:different drummer::sunlit uplands:their finest hour

Back to Thoreau: 

Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not? There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff.

If this blog were perfect, I would have a tag for "perfectionism." 

Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient...

Time! 

... but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work.

Now does that admit of more than one interpretation?