Skibidi. Dop, dop, dop. Yes, yes. Skibidi. Double u. Neem, neem. This is the clarion call of the modern age, the infernal message brought unto our virgin ears by the Skibidi Toilets. No, wait, keep reading! It’ll be worth it. Probably. After all, the word skibidi has now been added to the Cambridge Dictionary, and this is a reality we’ve all got to reckon with.
Skibidi Toilet, in case you’ve been living somewhere free from the influence of vertically-framed surrealism, is a long-running series of 3D animations by YouTuber Alexey ‘DaFuq!?Boom!’ Gerasimov. It generally conveys the tale of a great war between a legion of heads protruding from loos and an army of folks with cameras for heads, with help from Half-Life 2 assets and inspiration from the annals of Garry’s Mod machinima. Any 12 year olds you know probably can’t get enough of it. Or think it’s lame because they’ve already moved on to the next thing.
Anyway, as if Michael Bay spearheading efforts to make a Skibidi Toilet movie wasn’t enough reason for you to be aware of this lavatory entertainment, the folks behind the Cambridge Dictionary are adding it to their great tome of words this year. I should stress here that it’s one of thousands of words being added to the annals. The others include the likes of tradwife, delulu, broligarchy, and mouse jiggler.
“It’s not every day you get to see words like ‘skibidi’ and ‘delulu’ make their way into the Cambridge Dictionary. We only add words where we think they’ll have staying power,” said the tradebook of terminology’s lexical programme manager, Colin McIntosh.
So, the bookish boffins clearly think the skibidi era’s more than a passing fad. I for one look forward to historians in centuries’ time blowing the dust off of tomes so they can scan through firsthand accounts of the skibidi era. Weathered folks in fields gasping in awe as their trowels unearth plastic designed to resemble part of G-Toilet’s unholy ceramic bowl. I mean, to be fair, they’re also definitely going to discover people posed like this with the likes of Stellar Blade burned into their screens. We can only pray that we’re not brought back as Futurama-style heads-in-jars to explain any of this.
At the very least, this cultural event that’s just about linked to video games has at least finally taught me what skibidi means. “A word that can have different meanings such as ‘cool’ or ‘bad’, or can be used with no real meaning as a joke”, is how the Cambridge Dictionary defines the term. The example sentence given is “What the skibidi are you doing?”.
Hang on a minute, maybe this is the sort of versatile expression Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick could use to convey the sorts of games his company are striving to make! If good is bad and great is the new great, then maybe GTA 6 can only be accurately described as skibidi.
I’m preparing to petition my co-workers to add this important term to the RPS style guide, along with an instruction that it must be used in every article that doesn’t cover uber-serious news, on pain of death. Wish me luck in climbing out of the skip Edwin, James, and Nic will rightly lob me into.