SLOP III – What’s next for /slɒp/?

A changing world or a change in the word?

Slop remains a hot word, but will it last? So far it’s a meme phrase, born out of internet community and that whole ironic miasma. But the past year of usage shows it might escape being a passing fad, used in serious contexts like those mentioned in Part 1 – and on a gut level, I feel like I can’t go one day without seeing somebody use the word ‘slop.’ But words are always changing, and as we saw in Part 1, this word came out of a hazy vibe without a super reliable meaning to it. If it sticks around, it’ll have to eventually become more concrete, so how could it evolve from here? Or, will this article read very strange in a year, when ‘slop’ becomes the new ‘fleek’?

I’ve picked out four words of interest which have taken their own journeys which reflect some possible routes ‘slop’ could go, and because it’s an internet article, I’ve put them in a numbered list. Let’s go!

1. Clanker
/ˈklæŋkəɹ/

2. (Internet slang, derogatory, humorous, science fiction) 
A robot or artificial intelligence. 
“Clanker,” Wiktionary, accessed September 3, 2025.

Clanker represents a similar contemporary case – in that it’s meme language tied to the AI crisis, spread primarily by online usage and originating out of this comedic context. The term comes from the Star Wars fandom by way of r/prequelmemes, where memes like the below takes a fictional slang used in the Clone Wars television series for its antagonist Battle Droids, and re-frames it as analogous to racial slurs for an edgy joke:

This was then appropriated in wider social media for a negative, anthropomorphic slur for AI in the real world, mostly as comedy.

Its usage is still in its infancy and tinged with irony, it’s dubious due to how it anthropomorphizes AI, and it’s been criticized for how the often the term is invoked to play out barely modified scenarios of anti-Black discrimination – so how long it’ll last is uncertain. However, it’s clearly got a bit of political potential when AI is such a source of political tension.

Could slop go the same way? Its original appearance in internet language was, as in the first article I posted here, born out of far-right political memes and for several years its contemporary use remained mostly tied to ‘goyslop’ as an anti-semitic meme. The pig metaphor and the unpleasant image it invokes are easily called to mind and snappy, it works well politically. Now, as it is used very often as part of ‘AI slop’, it’s more tied to the political issue of AI generated media – the same way that Clanker is to the AI crisis more broadly. If ‘AI slop’ continues to be a dominant term for describing AI content negatively, it could become a politically partisan term – you call it slop if you’re signalling an anti-AI stance, and you use a different word if you’re pro-AI.

Compared to Clanker, which is tied to ironic use originally, owing to transferring a Star Wars meme into a word used in real world contexts, it may have more lasting potential for that – slop is gross, but it’s not got as thick a grain of jokeyness as turning Star Wars fandom lingo into a slur. In a non-jokey political use, it might be similar to how terms like ‘soy’ or ‘chud’ are descriptors that express the political views of their user: “Soy” demonstrating the speaker is right-wing and the thing they’re describing is effeminate, or “chud” showing the speaker is left-wing and the person described is both unpleasant and right-wing.

Slop could become more politicized, and become a way to signal political views.

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2.  Slag
/slæɡ/

1.a. [technical and scientific] A piece of stony waste material... 
produced in the smelting or refining of metal 
or from other industrial processes.

2.4.d. colloquial (chiefly British). derogatory and offensive. 
A sexually promiscuous or lascivious woman. 
Also: a female prostitute. 
Now the most common sense in non-technical use.

Oxford English Dictionary, “slag (n.1),” December 2024.

Slag is another one that shares elements with slop – it too is a term originally describing a specific component of industry (metal scrap, scrap food for farm animals), and then used in a popular metaphor that became a dominant use.

Using it for metal is about as old as metalworking, but it takes a shift in the 19th century. Slag began to be used metaphorically to describe leftover waste products in general, but also people – the ‘waste products’ of humankind. In 1882, from a ‘race science’ article for the American Association for Advancement of Science:

No one supposes that the Eskimos, the Fuegians, the Mincopies, the Hottentot, the Australians, the Digger Indians were created where they are, or that in these dispirited creatures, this slag; of humanity, we have the unaltered progeny of pristine man.

Proceedings 30th Meeting American Association for Advancement of Science 348, 1882

This is a popular metaphor in 19th century Britain, and sticks around through the next century while gradually drifting in its meaning – in 1968, a police officer’s memoir refers to:

Only prostitutes, their friends, layabouts, tom watchers, petty criminals and the like are left—‘the slag’ we call them.

J. Lock, Lady Policeman xii. 108

Unfortunately because it’s a slang word it’s hard to find as much detail as I’d like, but Oxford has it that it remains in police slang to this day, used by cops to describe an underclass. However, in common parlance around the mid 20th century, its usage to describe ‘low class people’ centered especially on denigrating promiscuous women. This meaning becomes its main use in British English dialects – so while you might enjoy a slagroom in Den Haag, that’ll read very different in London.

This reflects one, less dramatic possible future for ‘slop’, which is that its popularity in this metaphorical meaning could split the meanings, until the original metaphor isn’t recognizable. Slag to people who don’t work in industry just means ‘slattern’, even if it was once likening someone to industrial waste products. If slop took this route, it may end up that we think of things being slop to mean ‘generated by a computer’, and the idea that ‘pig slop’ and ‘AI slop’ were once closely linked would be the sort of fun anecdote you learn from a pop sci book.

Slop may branch off, remaining in use but establishing the analogy as a new meaning, such that it is no longer an analogy.

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3. Brainrot
/ˈbreɪn ˌrɑt/

[1.a] A perceived loss of intelligence or 
critical thinking skills, esp. (in later use) 
as attributed to the overconsumption of 
unchallenging or inane content or material. 

[1.b] Now also: content or material 
that is perceived to have this effect. 
In recent use particularly associated with 
the overconsumption of such content posted online.
Oxford English Dictionary, “brain rot (n.),” June 2025.

Brainrot as a phrase is tied up with ‘slop’ pretty tightly, it’s another jokey expression originating out of social media and the younger generations, and implicitly condemns the poor state of the internet today. From the start of this series, I’ve been finding the meme of ‘brainrot’ tied up with ‘slop’ (The video opening the first article is “Brainrottopia”.)

Now clearly it’s an exaggeration to say the internet is rotting kids brains, and it’s the same style of exaggeration as older phrases like “all that TV will rot your brain.” The phrase can be dated all the way back to Henry David Thoreau:

…in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?
Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), Conclusion. Henry David Thoreau.

But we also know it’s not as wrong as we’d hope. The past decade of research into the psychological impact of social media has made clear that it’s not good for our brains to be on these platforms. This fact is not just known academically, by now it’s common knowledge. The entire field of self-help apps and plans based on ‘dopamine addiction,’ the common use of ‘FOMO’ in everyday speech (The term’s from marketing psychology), or even how products are like Part 2’s Paladins: Learn History are advertised as an alternative to ‘doomscrolling.’ it’s pretty common knowledge that these techs are messing with your brainmeat.

Brainrot is used as a jokey term, but there’s a large cultural fear that’s laughing through the word – the fear we all have that we’re changed for the worse by these technologies, and the younger generation suffer the most.

What happens if a kid grows up in this digital environment? What does it do to their psychology or their sense of the world? That is one way that the meaning of ‘slop’ may change, the possible future which we’re all grappling with: what if this becomes normal for the next generation? Will the ‘brainrot’ of it mean that what is ‘slop’ to us – AI generated images and text, attention-sucking technotricks, psychologically exploitative content practices – will be normalized to the point of non-slop?

Let’s hope not, but it is one way that meaning could change. The use of AI tech in children’s toys, educational programming, or children’s books – which is already happening – and the further digitalizing of life of the younger generation in an AI-obsessed tech market mean that AI slop will be a big part of the kids’ cultural diet if trends don’t change.

The things which are called slop today could become normalized, and so the term would lose its relative meaning. 

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4. Slop
/slɑp/

4.a. plural. Wide baggy breeches or hose, 
of the kind commonly worn in the 
16th and early 17th cent.; 
loose trousers, esp. those worn by sailors. 
Now chiefly dialect.

5.a. plural. Ready-made clothing and other 
furnishings supplied to seamen from 
the ship's stores; hence, ready-made, 
cheap, or inferior garments generally.
Oxford English Dictionary, “slop (n.1),” March 2025.

See, there’s another use of slop that’s been pretty much forgotten. Back in the days of early industry, slop went on a whole other journey. Back in the 18th century, you find it defined as:

Slops, a wide sort of Breeches worn by Seamen.

The new world of words; or, universal English dictionary • (ed. John Kersey) · 6th edition, 1706 (1 vol.), 616.

This term may actually date back to the Middle Ages – with the Late Medieval poet Chaucer using the term ‘Sloppes’ – but over time, this term becomes a common term in English for the pants of sailors, which the British navy was trying to mass produce as ready-made uniforms to cut costs.

Ready-mades (pre-sewn clothing) turned out to be a great way to make clothing cheap and in bulk, and so ready-mades for non-military consumption became a booming industry for a time – now also called ‘slops’ due to the original ready-made garment. But as civilian demand for ready-mades emerged, the term slop began to be used for every ready-made. So, in post-revolution Boston, you can find quotes like: 

…we were occustomed [sic] to consider
this continent only as a sort of slop shop for the
sale of English commodities.

“The Force of Habit,” Weekly Aurora (Philadelphia), June 7, 1819, 122.

See, these mass-produced slops were not known for their good quality, and the process of buying them from a great big warehouse full of imported clothes was far from luxurious. Market conditions turned, and mass-produced modifiable patterns for tailoring became more popular, while ‘slop’ was becoming associated with cheap clothes for poor folk. Peddlers of clothes began styling themselves no longer as ‘slopsellers’ but as ‘merchant taylors’ or ‘master taylors’, and eventually we get the standard ‘tailor’ for a clothing maker. 

So here, slop went on a whole journey, from a broadening of it as a noun from a style of sailing pants, to a common type of ready made pants, to all readymades, until it fell off because cultural and economic conditions meant people weren’t using the term – as the thing it described was gone. The industry left, so the word left. After the switch from the term ‘slop seller’ and the decline in ready-made sales, slop in this meaning disappears from the English language. You can only really find it used this way by the historical reenactment community, or scholars.

There is another way that ‘slop’ today could go – it could go the way of ‘slop.’

If it becomes super tied to this industry of race-to-the-bottom AI generated content, and then that industry is disrupted – a way to filter this content becomes popular, or the services become inaccessible – this branch of new meaning may fully snap.

Slop could fade in use, if the thing it’s describing fades.

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We need concepts to make sense of our world and to talk about it – slop is here because there’s a thing that needs to be articulated. More and more feels like empty consumption, more feels hollow, people feel more gross about their own consumption. There’s no reason to assume the slop tide will stop, either. In fact it’s, it seems to be accelerating. The same forces of enshittification which have brought about the drop in quality of tech products remains in play throughout the economy, costs must be cut to drive up new value, and AI has been the magic cost-cutter at the cost of quality. With GenAI’s help, slop will keep coming.

Yet at the same time, how we’ll react to prevalent slop is still uncertain. Will it rot the brains of the next generation? Will it be a passing trend, vanishing when the algorithms change? Will it become yet another bit of ordinary language, forgetting its origin in tension? Or could it become tied to anti-machine learning politics, a word to accompany action? Could there be even more routes I’m missing? 

Language forms on that membrane between people and the world, as we use it to describe and interpret it. As a word grows, changes, loses or gains new meaning, it does so where we meet the shivering world, showing the outline of something we can’t normally observe. Right now we are observing this funny word changing before our eyes. ”Slop” will ride the shape of the next months, and years.

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Additional References
1. Miller, Amy. Dressed to Kill : British Naval Uniform, Masculinity and Contemporary Fashions, 1748-1857. Greenwich, London: National Maritime Museum, 2021.
2. Putman, Tyler Rudd. “Joseph Long’s Slops.” Winterthur Portfolio 49, no. 2/3 (June 2015): 63–91. https://doi.org/10.1086/683042.
3. Toplis, Alison. The Clothing Trade in Provincial England, 1800–1850. Routledge EBooks. Informa, 2015. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315655765.