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Comment by add-sub-mul-div | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if they went straight to "AI" as an insult independently from the older generations, or if they were using "slop" like the rest of us but had to adopt a new insult because "slop" has been co-opted to refer to things that are terrible whether AI or not.

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"slop" existed before AI. It wasn't co-opted: it never specifically meant AI-generated.

While slop seems to be the popular term online, I never hear it spoken aloud. With Gen Alpha’s exposure to AI mostly through school, spoken media (youtube, tv), and their parents, “AI” probably cropped up independently as an insult

I feel "slop" is more specifically about the quality of some output rather than a synonym for "bullshit" like "AI" appears to be. And like "bullshit", "AI" can mean either "not true", "poor quality", or "this/that sucks".

And "That’s so slop" sounds awkward. But mostly I think the kids haven’t even heard of "AI slop" which isn’t really in the general lexicon, at least yet. That is, the prevalence of its use in these circles is a bubble effect. I doubt anybody ever uses it in kids' Tiktoks or Youtubes or whatever.

Slop meant cheap garbage meant for mass consumption before it was used for AI. The roots are actually antisemitic. 4chan's cooking board used "goyslop" to mean fast food and other cheap consumerist foods that they claimed the illuminati or jewish conspiracy or whateve fed to non jews to keep them unhealthy. Its crazy how often 4chan's neonazi rambling are the start of so many cultural phenomena. They supported trump way before he became a serious candidate in 2016

People give 4chan far too much credit. Slop was a term that was used, maybe not widely, well before it was picked up by internet racists. Slop was used to refer to the stuff you'd feed to pigs, and if you were American, school children.

I looked up the etymology of "slop" and I did not find any reference to antisemitism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goyslop

> The term is a compound word joining goy, a Hebrew and Yiddish word for a non-Jew or gentile,[4][3] and slop, meaning food waste or refuse of low quality

So you're telling me that a word which has "slop" in its origins is itself the origin of "slop"?

This must be the first case of circular etymology!

There are a couple of other cases. Dog was once (1845, UK) slang for sausage, due to fears of dog meat. Then a hot sausage was a hot dog, and then hot dog was a sausage, and finally just dog was slang for a sausage again, with the sinister implication removed. I also found pepper, from Latin (from Sanskrit?), leading to pep, the thing a pepper does to you, leading back to pepper (a kind of pre-game warm-up in baseball designed to give players pep).

You might object that those are really back-and-forth, but so is the claim being made here about slop. (I kind of doubt the claim though.)

:D TIL where "hot dog" comes from! Thanks! :D

I don't think your examples apply though. The dog example is just dog meaning sausage, sometimes with a temperature quality added (or ignored), but always a sausage with no other connotations.

The pepper one, maybe a little, though according to Etymonline [0] pep is short for pepper, so it's all the same really.

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/pep

That’s a different word. And it’s a word that came long after “slop.” It only makes sense if you know what “slop” means. I don’t actually understand why you’re linking me to this.

It has been in widespread use in the UK without any antisemitic overtones. "Sloppy" is even more common as a term for badly done work.

It has meant the unwanted, waste food scraps dumped into a trough and eaten by pigs (the farm animal) for a lot longer than that.

I'm not sure that's the case, lots of supposed 4chan coinages came from elsewhere and 'slop' is much older. It's been known in the sense of 'liquid household refuse' from the 19th century.

That's a very dodgy etymology. The use of "slop" to refer to trashy content dates back to the late 19th/early 20th century, long before the advent of the internet.

I think our tendency to attribute "novel" word usage to 4chan might reflect more on us than on our language.

I'm a little short on primary reference material, but here's an example from 1917: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22692/pg22692-images.ht.... Conversation on language log has at least two others from 1897 and 1920 respectively.

You don't need to make everything about the Jews.

The etymology to be “mud puddle” from the 1400s with that being taken from old English -sloppe meaning “dung” for even longer.

“Slopping the hogs” is probably where the modern negative interpretation comes from of forcing garbage onto someone.

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