Why Gen Z Can't Stop Saying 'Rizz,' 'Slay,' and 'Eeny Meeny' — And the Brain Science Behind It Is Actually Fascinating

Somewhere between a viral TikTok of a twenty-two-year-old doing a counting-out rhyme to decide what to eat for lunch and a linguist at a major university quietly updating her research notes, something genuinely interesting is happening to the English language.

Gen Z — that much-analyzed, frequently misunderstood, perpetually online generation — is doing something that looks silly on the surface but turns out to be surprisingly sophisticated underneath. They're reviving nonsense. On purpose. With intention. And the internet is eating it up.

Here at Eenyakee, we're basically professionally obligated to care about this. So we did what any self-respecting entertainment site would do: we went full investigative mode. We talked to creators, we called a linguist, we spent way too many hours on TikTok (for journalism, obviously), and we're ready to report back.

First, Let's Talk About What's Actually Happening Online

If you've spent any time on TikTok or Instagram Reels in the past year, you've noticed the pattern. Counting rhymes — eeny meeny miny mo, bubble gum bubble gum in a dish — are showing up in videos with millions of views. Tongue twisters are being speedrun like competitive sports. Made-up words with zero dictionary standing (rizz, slay, no cap, bussin) have colonized everyday conversation so completely that major news outlets have published explainers about them.

And it's not just slang. It's the texture of the language that's shifted. Gen Z communication online tends to be rhythmic, repetitive, and almost incantatory. Think of the way 'understood the assignment' spread, or how 'main character energy' became a whole framework for self-narration. These phrases have a cadence to them. They're almost chant-like.

That's not an accident.

What a Linguist Actually Said (And It's Not What You'd Expect)

We reached out to Dr. Priya Mehta, a sociolinguist who studies digital communication patterns and youth language at a research university on the East Coast. Her take was, to put it academically, wild.

"What we're seeing isn't really a regression to childhood," she explained. "It's more accurate to call it a strategic reclamation. Young people are reaching back into a shared cultural vocabulary — one that existed before social hierarchies, before professional identity, before all the pressure of being a 'self' online — and using it as a kind of shorthand for authenticity."

In other words: when everything online feels performative and curated, talking like you're seven years old on a playground is a flex. It signals I'm not trying too hard. I'm comfortable enough to be weird.

Mehta also pointed out that nonsense language has always served a social bonding function. "Counting rhymes specifically are fascinating because their content is irrelevant — what matters is the shared experience of the ritual. When two people both know 'eeny meeny miny mo,' they have an instant connection point that bypasses a lot of the friction of normal social interaction."

So when a creator posts a video using a childhood rhyme and their comment section explodes with people finishing the verse, that's not just engagement. That's community formation happening in real time.

The Creators Who Are Actually Driving This

We talked to a handful of Gen Z creators who've built followings, at least in part, on this kind of playful, rhyme-adjacent content. The patterns in what they told us were striking.

Jamila, 24, runs a lifestyle account out of Atlanta with about 180,000 followers. She started incorporating counting rhymes into her decision-making videos — 'should I text him back? Let the rhyme decide' — almost as a joke. "I did not expect people to lose their minds over it," she said. "But the comments were all like, 'Oh my god, my grandma used to say this,' or 'We did this exact rhyme at my school in Ohio.' It connected people who had nothing else in common."

That geographic collapse is something several creators mentioned. Counting rhymes, tongue twisters, and playground chants exist in regional variations across the US — slightly different words, different hand motions, different contexts — and when they surface online, the comment sections become this spontaneous ethnography of American childhood. People from rural Tennessee and suburban California discover they both grew up with some version of the same nonsense verse, and something clicks.

Marcus, 21, a college student in Chicago who makes absurdist comedy content, puts it more bluntly: "Grown-up humor is exhausting sometimes. Everything has to be clever and layered and reference something. With the dumb stuff — the rhymes, the made-up words — you don't have to work as hard. Everyone's already in on it."

The Nostalgia Economy and Why It Hits Different Right Now

It would be lazy to just call this a nostalgia trend and move on. But context matters: Gen Z came of age during a period of overlapping crises — a pandemic, economic anxiety, a particularly chaotic political climate, and the unrelenting pressure of being the first generation to grow up entirely on social media. That's a lot.

Research on nostalgia (and yes, there's a whole field of it) consistently shows that people lean into nostalgic content more heavily during periods of stress or uncertainty. It functions as what psychologists call a temporal escape — a mental return to a time that felt simpler, safer, more legible.

But here's what makes Gen Z's version different from previous generations doing the same thing: they're not being passive about it. They're not just consuming nostalgic content — they're remixing it. A counting rhyme doesn't just get posted straight; it gets sped up, layered over a trending audio, given an unexpected punchline, or used as a framework for commenting on something completely unrelated to childhood. The nostalgia is the raw material, not the final product.

Mehta calls this "nostalgic bricolage" — borrowing a term from anthropology. "They're taking cultural fragments from the past and reassembling them into something new that serves present needs. It's actually quite creative, even when it looks like chaos."

The Identity Piece: Language as Group Membership

Here's where it gets really interesting. In anthropology and linguistics, there's a concept called in-group language — the specialized vocabulary, phrases, and communication styles that signal membership in a particular community. Every subculture has it. Skaters, gamers, theater kids, corporate drones — they all have their own linguistic fingerprints.

What Gen Z has done, seemingly without a formal plan, is create an extremely large in-group whose membership signal is the willingness to be deliberately silly. Knowing the right nonsense words, being able to finish a counting rhyme, understanding why a particular made-up term is funny — these function as social credentials.

"It's a low-barrier form of cultural fluency," Mehta told us. "You don't need money or status or a specific background to participate. You just need to have been a kid and have internet access. That's remarkably democratic as far as in-group formation goes."

That accessibility is part of why it spreads so fast. There's no gatekeeping. The rhymes belong to everyone.

So What Does This Actually Mean?

Honestly? Maybe nothing world-historical. Or maybe something. The line between 'interesting cultural moment' and 'thing that gets a Netflix documentary in ten years' is thin and mostly visible in retrospect.

What we can say with confidence is this: Gen Z is not being silly by accident. The playfulness is intentional, the community-building is real, and the psychological function of all of it — stress relief, identity formation, nostalgia as coping mechanism — is genuinely meaningful.

And if the result is that a whole generation ends up with 'eeny meeny miny mo' as a shared cultural touchstone? Honestly, we're here for it. We've literally built our whole brand on that energy.

The internet is a weird place. Sometimes the answer to that weirdness is to point at it and say mo. 🫵