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Comment by tumult | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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