From brat to bootylicious: How pop changed the English language

Charli XCX’s new definition of messiness has been named Word of the Year. But she’s hardly the first pop star to make it into the dictionary

Brat is where it’s at. Having conquered the colour spectrum with its lime-green theme and parachuted into American politics via a social media love-in with Kamala Harris, Charli XCX’s “Brat” has now been named word of the year by Collins English Dictionary. It’s a huge achievement for a pop star who, until 2024, couldn’t break out of their cult status and was playing modest theatre-sized venues as recently as 18 months ago.
Collins heralded Brat as a concept that has conquered the world. “More than a hugely successful album, ‘brat’ is a cultural phenomenon that has resonated with people globally, and “brat summer” established itself as an aesthetic and a way of life,” the publisher said.
What’s remarkable about Brat’s takeover of popular culture is that it doesn’t have a straightforward definition. Collins describes Brat as “characterised by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude”. Yet the explanation offered by Charli is slightly different. On TikTok last summer, she said Brat meant “You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown.”
kamala IS brat
However one defines Brat, it has nailed its slime green colours to the zeitgeist. Nor is it the only word that pop culture has lately been added to our lexicon. Collins said that other “new and notable” words in 2024 include the Taylor Swift-derived Era – “a period of one’s life or career that is of a distinctive character”.
The significant thing about both these words is that they aren’t new. Prior to Charli XCX, “Brat” was in no way an obscure term and it isn’t as if “Era” was in danger of falling out of popular use before Taylor Swift named her greatest hits tour after it.
It is interesting, moreover, to contrast these with other notable “new” words highlighted by Collins, such as “delulu” and “rawdogging.” The former means “to be utterly mistaken or unrealistic in one’s ideas or expectations” while the latter refers to taking a long-haul flight without any digital distractions. Unlike Brat and Era, neither was in widespread use until recently.
The takeaway is that pop music may not create words from thin air, but it has a track record of putting a new spin on terms we are already familiar with. Take “espresso”, for instance. There is an indisputable “before” and “after” moment dating from the Sabrina Carpenter hit of the same name. Beforehand, it meant a black coffee in a tiny cup; after Carpenter put out Espresso this April, it was impossible to hear the word in your head without immediately jumping to the line “Switch it up like Nintendo… that’s me espresso”.
But none of this fell out of the clear blue – or slime green – sky. As far back as the Sixties, pop’s original mop-topped brats, The Beatles, popularised phrases such as “Whatever gets you through the night”, “hard day’s night”, and, via George Harrison’s solo career, “all things must pass” (though George, to his credit, acknowledged he’d taken that one from the Bible). “Fab” also received a boost from Macca and pals after they were crowned the Fab Four.
However, it was hip-hop that really impacted spoken English. According to the New York Times, the use of “dope” as a superlative comes from African-American rappers. “Dope”, it was suggested, had two origins. The first was the Dutch word “doop”, meaning “dipping sauce”, which by 1909 had come to refer to the “thick treacle-like preparation used in opium smoking”. But the NYT claimed “dope” was additionally about taking ownership of the word that had previously been used as an insult.
“Dope also had another meaning: a stupid person. In the wider culture, stereotypes of black people as being unintelligent still endured, so it was an act of radical reclamation when, in the 1980s, rappers began to use “dope” to refer to superlative music, lyrics, fashion or anything else considered praiseworthy.”
“Jiggy” has taken a similar journey. In the 19th century, it meant folk music that encouraged the listener to dance a jig. A century later, Will Smith put a different spin on it with his 1997 hit Gettin’Jiggy Wit It, which was followed by Five, who went all in by rhyming “jiggy” with “wiggy wiggy”.
Around the same time, The Beastie Boys are credited with popularising the concept of the “mullet” hairstyle. While the short at the front, crazy at the back look had been around for years, it took the Beasties’ 1994 tune, Mullet Head, to put a name to it, as they rhymed, “You’re coming off like you’re Van Damme / You’ve got Kenny G, in your Trans Am / You’ve got names like Billy Ray / Now you sing Hip Hop Hooray.”
Early hip-hop also gave us the term “diss”– with Spoonie G’s 1979 track Spoonie Rap thought to have coined the word (“I say you want to be dissed and then you want to be a crook/ You find an old lady, take her pocketbook”). The word “bling,” meanwhile, is believed to have entered popular usage thanks to the 1999 tune Bling Bling by Cash Crew Millionaires and rapper BG.
The deeper origins of some of these words are phrases are lost in time. Others can be dated to a specific moment – such as “Bootylicious”, which emerged in a cheeky thunderclap with the Destiny’s Child song in 2001 (although Snoop Dogg had already employed it on a guest appearance on Dr Dre’s The Chronic). Similarly, the use of “stan” to refer to a maniacal fan can be carbon-dated to Eminem’s tune of the same name from 2000, which predicted the age of obsessive celebrity followers and made Dido famous by sampling her on the chorus.
It’s a considerable distance from the darkness of Eminem’s Stan to the messy green hues of Charli’s Brat summer. The connecting line is the fact that pop music is hugely impactful on everyday language and on how we think about and interact with the world on a daily basis. Even if nobody can precisely define Brat, we all have a sense of what it means – a feeling of being extravagantly dishevelled and not quite together but celebrating this as a positive rather than a negative. The word Brat may belong to 2024, but the idea behind it will last much longer.