Perhaps underlining the case for its renewed usefulness, “brain rot” seemed at first a rather uninspired choice as Oxford University Press word of the year.
Leaving aside the fact that it’s two words, the phrase had been around a long time already, at least since Henry David Thoreau compared it with a certain fungus, phytophthora infestans, 170 years ago.
“While England endeavours to cure the potato rot,” he wrote in 1854, “will not any endeavour to cure the brain rot?” Ever since, periodically, outbreaks of the latter disease have been reported on both sides of the Atlantic.
In late 20th century Ireland, the condition was often blamed on television. Hence a Belfast Telegraph reviewer in 1973 finding unexpected common cause with the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, who wanted to censor broadcast output: “I might even be tempted to have a go myself, seeking the suppression of some of the feebler stuff on the grounds that it tends to encourage brain rot,” confessed the critic. “Top of the list would be Crossroads and anything with Hughie Green in it.”
Elsewhere in that decade, a tragic individual case was diagnosed, involving the film actor Richard Burton. After his performances in a string of terrible movies, the Detroit Free Press wrote of him: “He’s a heavy drinker and I think he has brain rot [but] he’s supposedly off the sauce now and trying to pull himself together.”
Back in Ireland, meanwhile, an Irish Times columnist named Maeve Binchy was repenting of her former judgmentalism about a friend’s obsession with fashion magazines: “It was a pity, we thought, that she was letting her brain rot and atrophy over such a strange interest … a sad blot in an otherwise fine character.”
Okay, that was the phrase in verb form, not a noun. But Maeve used it on three separate occasions in the same piece, of herself and others, suggesting brain rot was a major concern in Dalkey then.
Further back in the archives, I find that the condition was also a big worry to Irish nationalists, before, during and after the War of Independence.
In a letter to the Connacht Tribune in 1927, for example, an ardently republican correspondent, Claud de Ceabhasa, defended Éamon de Valera against criticisms from one Ed Murphy. So doing, he generously excused the latter of cerebral decay, but only by suggesting there might be other, worse conditions at work: “Mr Murphy’s muddled ideas are not necessarily due to ‘brain rot,’ whatever one may think of his glaring misstatements and his vituperation,” De Ceabhasa wrote.
The earliest Irish example I can find in print is from 1912, in the newspaper Sinn Féin, edited by Arthur Griffith. But there, it was in the lyrics of a satirical ballad, which suggests the expression was common already.
Entitled The Banishment of the Bards, the ballad updated a 6th-century controversy wherein a high king tried to abolish the Bardic tradition, which had become allegedly corrupt, only for St Columba to intervene and save the poets.
In the 1912 song, the bards assembled to defend themselves against another threat – imported foreign music – which it was their turn to consider corrupting, eg: “Cakewalk and ragtime and tit-bits of French/Claptrap and bunkum, brain rot and stench./Deserted at last are the groves of Parnassus,/And music has fled ‘fore the braying of asses.”
The dangers of foreign music were to become an obsession in the early years of the Free State, culminating 90 years ago this winter with the Anti-Jazz Campaign of 1934.
That now sounds like a plot from Father Ted, but it was led by a real Leitrim priest, Peter Conifrey, who wasn’t joking. He considered jazz to be, among other things, an “engine of hell”.
The campaign had featured a march through Mohill on New Year’s Day 1934, where protesters chanted “Down with jazz”.
It was still going strong in November, with delegates at the county convention of the Gaelic League in Carrick-on-Shannon told they had brought Leitrim to “the eyes of the world”, although there were also some signs of a split.
One speaker angrily condemned criticism of the minister for finance, Seán MacEntee, who had “learned his nationality in a hard school” [Belfast] and fought for it more bravely that many of his critics.
Fr Conifrey was unbowed. McEntee was a good Irishman, he agreed, but to support jazz dances, as he had done, “was not the spirit of the men who gave their lives for Irish freedom”.
Brain rot aside, the priest went on to invoke another phrase beginning with “B”, a word of the year back in 1917 and still going strong then.
As paraphrased by The Irish Times, he blamed Bolshevism for the conspiracy: “The jazz dance and music were borrowed from Central Africa by a gang of wealthy international Bolshevists,” said Fr Conifrey, “their aim being to strike at Christian civilisation throughout the world.”