meatbrain

English

Etymology

Compound of meat +‎ brain.

Noun

meatbrain (plural meatbrains)

1. (US, colloquial) An unintelligent person.

   Synonyms: meathead, lardbrain; see also Thesaurus:fool

   • 1999, Janny Wurts, Grand Conspiracy (Wars of Light and Shadow; 5), London: Voyager, →ISBN, page 283:

     'Plague take the fists of lust-ridden sailors,' snapped the herbalist in riled temper. Planks scraped as she jammed her door open wider to admit the next client on her threshold. 'If you've brought me the meatbrains who savaged that girl, let me tell you, I'm likely to geld him.'

   • 2009, Tristan Bancks, Mac Slater: Imaginator, Sydney, N.S.W.: Random House Australia, published 2016, →ISBN, page 26:

     They snorted and shook their heads like I was a meatbrain.

2. (chiefly science fiction) A biological brain (as opposed to an artificial or man-made one).
   • 2013, Joshua Raulerson, Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century, Liverpool, Merseyside: Liverpool University Press, →ISBN, page 199:

     Installed on meatbrains whose habituation to computer-mediated activities has made them perilously vulnerable to infection by aggressive memes, the 'Babel' virus corrupts and overwrites the deep structures of human language, thereby 'crashing' the mind, and civilization with it.

   • 2019 April 8, Gretchen McCulloch, “Coding Is for Everyone—as Long as You Speak English”, in Wired‎^[1], San Francisco, Calif.: Condé Nast Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2024-05-15:

     The fact that programming languages often resemble English words like body or if is a convenient accommodation for our puny human meatbrains, which are much better at remembering commands that look like words we already know.

Related terms

• meatspace

Further reading

• “meatbrain n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 2016–present