On Oct. 7, McLean Computational Linguistics, or McLing, held an online presentation discussing the linguistic conventions and contextual uses of brain rot words. The club meeting was held via Google Meet and covered the meanings and origins of several popular terms, such as skibidi, sigma and ratio.

McLing typically holds in person meetings, but scheduling conflicts forced the club to adapt.

“This year, we can’t meet after school as often because our sponsor is busier,” said Sarah Li, founder of McLing. “With online meetings, we hope that more people will be able to attend because they won’t have to physically stay after school.”

Computational linguistics is the practice of thinking algorithmically and finding patterns based on context clues. In club meetings, members typically work through linguistics problem sets. McLing felt that it was important to educate its members on brain rot slang, with its prevalence in students’ daily lives.

“We thought it was something that our audience would already be exposed to,” said Allegra O’Grady, co-founder of McLing. “We thought it was a good way to introduce them to linguistic concepts and how slang has a sort of system to it.”

McLing offers an opportunity for McLean students to test their skills in analytical thinking, scrutinizing the words around them.

“[Computational linguistics involves] being able to look at a problem from a broader perspective,” Li said. “It’s a combination of what you know about language and being open minded and trying to discover new patterns.”