Cast your mind forward, in just over a month’s time you will be with family, perhaps having traveled miles upon miles to be there. The heat of the summer has finally been slain in favor of the bitter cold of winter, which could only be combated with community.
Despite the persistent march of time leaving you an adult,in all but the eyes of your insurance company, you have for the umpteenth time in a row been banished to the children’s table.
Surrounded by children, the only real gulf between you being a high school education and their intact trust in authority, you might think you would get some respect. But the children’s table is a lot like prison, you gotta target the biggest guy there and make a name for yourself. Your little nephew, petulant as the kings of old, points at you and shrieks.
“Unc, you’re so skibidi” — devastating and indecipherable, like a monster from an H.P. Lovecraft novel.
Whether it’s a younger sibling, a niece or nephew, or even a grandchild — Chances are that this holiday season, you’re gonna be decoding some gen alpha slang.
But does gen alpha slang seem especially difficult to understand from an outsider perspective?
Perhaps it’s best to start with the one that seems the most fluid, “skibidi,” the nonsense phrase originates from “Skibidi Toilet” a web series by Youtuber Alexey Gerasimov. The video features a mashup of the song “Give It To Me” by Timbaland and “Dom Dom Yes Yes” by Biber King. The refrain of said mashup became the title of the subsequent series.
The first video features the head of a character model from the Valve game “Half-Life 2” coming out of a toilet and singing the aforementioned song. Following videos — currently totalling 76 — deepened the world of “Skibidi Toilet.”
These videos became a staple of the gen alpha media diet, racking up over 47 million views on the first video alone, with the estimated population of gen alpha being 2 billion at the end of 2025, according to data by demandsage, a data analytics firm. It wasn’t long before they began to influence their language.
“A meme in the internet sense isn’t just something popular, a video or image or phrase that goes viral,” according to the 2019 book “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language” by Gretchen McCulloch. “It’s something that’s remade and recombined, spreading as an atom of internet culture.”
The nature of the phrase “skibidi,” as a fragment of a reference that has come to be plastered onto hundreds and hundreds of other things, embodies this idea perfectly. “Skibidi” has gone through so many permutations of usage that knowing its origins does little to clarify its meaning.
This level of abstraction is also the origin of another gen alpha term, “brainrot.”
“You see in language there is always two ways you can talk about a word, you can use the world normally or you can mention it as an abstract concept” explained Adam Aleksic, a Harvard educated linguist and content creator who goes by @etymologynerd on Tiktok. In his video, Aleksic he highlights that most “brainrot” words are often on the “mention” end of this spectrum using “hawk Tuah” as an example.
“And the same is true for all the other brainrot words like skibidi, which is mentioned in reference to itself more than it’s actually used in reference to the fictional toilet series where it came from,That’s what makes something ‘Brainrot’ it’s characterized by a level of abstraction separate from its original use.”
This “brainrot” is a feature, not a bug, of language in the digital age. The speed at which language evolves on the internet makes it difficult to track exact meanings of phrases. So instead the words themselves become a fixture of langauge, gaining a new if abstract meaning.
So next time you’re at the dinner table, and your nephew asks you if you’re “sigma enough to pass the mash potatoes,” you can take solace in knowing that, due to the nature of the internet and how it interacts with linguistics, he likely doesn’t understand what it means either.
Just smile politely, hand him the mashed potatoes, and respond “of course slime. Anything for you, goat,” and watch him be reduced to a pile of ash from pure cringe exposure.
