Zoomers, we have bad news: your six or seven minutes at the vanguard of the cultural zeitgeist is officially over. The New York Times has published a new guide to Gen Z slang. It’s all downhill from here.

the TODAYit’s a guide is particularly notable for its insistence that a large amount of today’s slang is not new. The paper is clearly linked to this idea; in December of last year, they insisted that the term “brain rot” should be attributed to Henry David Thoreau, who used it in his 1854 glamping memoir Walden. They doubled down on this approach, reporting that zoomers’ hot new slang includes old words like “yap,” “skedaddle,” and (deep breath) “goon.”

Critics may argue that the TODAYIts grasp of some of the latest slang is not as strong as one would like to believe: for example, its assertion that “Calling someone a ‘goon’ was no longer a practice in the 1920s.” It seems dirty to direct someone as honorable and respected as the Gray Lady to the not-so-good parts of the internet, but… That’s not the use of “goon” in 2026, ma’am. (The paper of record does not exist absolutely flawless record this front.)

The whole everything-old-is-new-again angle also feels a little dubious. The article interviewed a Brianne Hughes, a historical linguist: “The old terms always return unconsciously in the midst of a kind of inventory every time a significant milestone arrives-like the turn of a decade or the anniversary of a cultural event. ‘It’s just a reason to go back to the old photos of the language, and as, Oh yes, I remember,’, it was very fun.

It would be interesting to know if there are studies and research that support this view – none cited – because intuitively, it seems perfectly possible for a term as common as “brain decay” to be created in 2026 as in 1854, and that in general, words and phrases are just as likely to be recreated from different iterations.

Does it matter? Well, for our money, the process by which slang emerges, spreads, and is eventually reabsorbed into the blob of “proper” language is one of the most fascinating parts of linguistics. It’s a process one can trace through Green’s Dictionary of Slang, a complete dictionary of argot that, while not as majestic as the NYT, is the more authentic source of its subject matter. As it happens, the entire dictionary has just been made available generally online for free, which is excellent news for anyone given to researching the etymology for shits and giggles.

And what does Green say about “brain rot”? Nothing. The term has never appeared in a slang dictionary on record, suggesting that Thoreau’s usage never made it out of the 19th-century skibidi toilet.