Vinyl stickers featuring Skibidi Toilet-themed designs Photo: Shutterstock Vinyl stickers featuring Skibidi Toilet-themed designs Photo: Shutterstock On my very first day at my new job, one of the kids in my writing class asked me, “What in the skibidi-sigma-gyatt-Ohio-rizzler is a research paper?”
I had moved to America just a few months earlier, and along with figuring out payment methods, learning the names of fruits and vegetables, and sorting trash into three separate categories, I was also trying to understand how to teach students from a demographic that I did not belong to and knew very less about – aside from the content I consumed over the years that was set in this part of the world. While working as a teacher in Washington, I have often found myself looking up words I thought would help me understand the generation I am teaching. I looked up the word “skibidi” on my work laptop.
I learned that while skibidi is a gibberish word with no apparent etymology to trace, it refers to something that has gone rogue. I knew what sigma meant, but I had to look up rizzler–someone with a lot of swag/rizz–and Ohio, which means weird and cringe. However, the meaning these words held when strung together, as understood by those using them, escaped me.
In class, I keep hearing my students blurt out, “What the skibidi” or “What the sigma” as if these phrases were some sort of magic expletives to help them vent their frustration. At times, some of my students very patiently explain these words to me, describing them as examples of what they call “brain rot”. Things got more serious when, in the drafts of their narrative essays, I started reading sentences like “He was not too willing to give his friend some fanum tax”, or “So-and-so was mewing his way through life on a Monday morning.” I found a few videos online explaining mewing–a TikTok trend that claims to help one chisel their jawline. Teenagers worldwide have embraced this viral trend, which–despite no supporting research– supposedly alters their physical appearance.
I asked my colleagues if they knew what was happening, and we were all in the same boat. We figured that something had caused a disconnect between us and Generation Alpha. I had still been keeping up with the Gen-Z slang words like GOAT, stan, lit, and even it’s giving; I would half-jokingly use these words in conversations with my millennial friends, and we would throw our heads back laughing at the sheer randomness of it. To be fair, we even got around to saying, “That looks so sus”, or “Please spill the tea.” Gen-z lingo was not only intelligible but also adaptable to our millennial sensibilities. That was before I started teaching writing to different age groups and began feeling the linguistic disconnect with the very tech-savvy Gen-Z and Alpha, who are growing up as digital natives. I was still hoping that this disconnect was purely linguistic.
Non-Sense Making: Why Should Gen Z And Gen Alpha Watch The Cinema Of David Lynch?Out of curiosity,ph444 one of my former colleagues and I decided to watch a few episodes of the YouTube shorts series Skibidi Toilet, which some of our students had recommended. It is a web series created by Alexey Gerasimov (first published in February 2023), in which a group of filthy toilets appears to be rebelling against humanoids with electronic devices for heads. While I did not find anything substantial explaining the cause of the rebellion, the suboptimal visuals of these YouTube shorts open with toilets–each with squalid human heads sticking out – smiling and singing an annoyingly catchy tune “Skibidi dop dop dop”. Aside from being blasted with guns and bombs, the toilets can also be defeated by flushing. Pulling the flush sends the tottering skibidi-heads spiralling down the drain. I was taken aback to find that some of these videos had amassed more than 200 million views. Browsing through the comment section, I noticed a significant portion of the comments ridiculing the series, and mocking its credibility. I also came across complaints from parents whose children were now afraid to use the bathroom at night, fearing their toilet might suddenly turn Skibidi.
Skibidi Toilet embodies everything that serious “adults” find deplorable– gibberish words strung together with an instant earworm, dirty toilets that shoot laser beams through their eyes to blast humans with CCTV heads, and low-quality content about a seemingly pointless rebellion, to name a few. The obsession with it may very well have started as a silly joke against the millennial preoccupation with contextual clarity, but there is more to it than that.
This is not the first time something bizarre has gone viral, nor will it be the last. It reminds me of a video published on YouTube eleven years ago titled Doing Nothing for Eight Hours Straight. The video delivers exactly what the title promises–a man sits on a couch for eight hours and does nothing. A couple of years later, he released another video titled Watching ‘Doing Nothing for Eight Hours Straight’ for Eight Hours Straight. Similarly, ten years ago, a video titled I am Poppy featured the American singer Poppy staring into the camera and relentlessly repeating “I am Poppy” for ten minutes. The viral nature of these videos makes one ponder what they had in common.
If something is viral, it has to be relatable. It is not just the content the viewer relates to. Sometimes, the viewer finds the reactions of other viewers (to the content) relatable. This makes the comment section of the content just as important as the content itself. The content that goes viral for its shock value, manages to shock a lot of people alike. Skibidi Toilet is not just a depiction of a dystopic world characterised by the shock value of grotesque absurdities and chaotic humour. It also serves as a symbolic reflection of the chaos we are raising our children in, which is reflected in their choice of content consumption. For them, coherence and quality are simply not the point. Gen Alpha and the generations that follow will inevitably grow up breathing the polluted air, drinking the most contaminated water, and facing the worst of the climate crisis–all consequences of the generations that came before them. They are beginning to understand what we have done to the world, and the reality is disorienting, to say the least. It is hypocritical to expect intelligibility and coherence from a generation of children who were thrown into chaos from the very outset.
There is no looking at the Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha without first looking in the mirror. They were the guinea pigs of the digital age, raised as digital natives who are constantly consuming an exorbitant amount of information. There is a strange irony in imagining the toilet heads rebelling against technology in the series. Skibidi Toilets –which serve a utilitarian function– waging a war against the tech-headed humanoids and their technological ambition.
Linguists across the world agree that young people–who seek to establish identities independent from the generations before them–are often the driving force behind linguistic change. We can call it change or evolution, but to me, it looks a lot like rebellion in its purest form, against the world they have received as a hand-me-down.
spaceman slot(Sritama Bhattacharyya is the Lead Teacher of Writing at Sylvan Learningjb casino, Bellevue, Washington.)
