The word of the year was slop
And most of it was typed by human hands
My 3rd job interview was a video call with a pair of initials and no video, just 2 letters where a face should’ve been. I answered questions for 40 minutes. The initials didn’t nod or frown or raise eyebrows at my sexiness. I came back 2 more times — 3 rounds in total — and I never once saw an actual person’s face despite talking to several. I don’t think we’re getting those walking interviews anytime soon kids.
With a divine blessing, they decided to hire me as a marketer. A creative role, or so I thought. My very first briefing on long-form Copy was to copy, not even winning Copy but the previous failed Copy, and stuff it with keywords for SEO. A couple of senior managers pulled me into a 2-hour Zoom call to walk me through definitions of Search Engine terminology that I swallowed the night before vomiting it on my mid-sem exam answer sheets the next day in college. The yearly content strategy arrived as a PowerPoint from a meeting that was above my pay grade — the exact funnel diagram from my college marketing textbook, passed down by my marketing overlords via another one of those signature Zoom meetings. Top of funnel. Middle of funnel. Bottom of funnel. I’m not sure if this is the case in every office that has glass windows but nobody turned their camera on unless the global marketing head joined the call. When she did, the managers sat up straight like school kids called to assemble in the football ground for the morning prayer.
For a long-form written piece, I once spent the entire day on this sentence: Leveraging our strategic learning framework to drive enterprise-wide agility and align organizational capability with business outcomes. Every word was so corporate-y and performative like the time when the Karen from HR started psychoanalyzing me like a DEI Jordan Peterson when I refused to “share my feelings” because my manager attacked my reputation and work ethic and painted me a liability for using em dashes in my writing. I felt a kind of heaviness in my chest — that comes from typing something technically correct that you know communicates nothing to the person who will read it. This case study I’m working on would be gated behind an email form. Someone would enter their address, receive a 7-page PDF, and close the tab before the second paragraph because all the PDF screams is “Look my strong look my strong” in corporate speak. The company would get an email address, a lead. The reader would get jargon. I asked whether any of this generated actual business leads — actual booked calls, actual contracts. But the answers were above my pay grade. I asked which content formats performed well and realized that we, as well as our competitors are essentially winging it as far as marketing goes. No one ever asked what problem are we solving wth our content and it was all about promoting yourself in every single post.
You’ve been on the other end, downloaded something, opened it on your screen, watched your own attention slide off the paragraphs like rain off the windshield. The business got your email. You got your “playbook” after commenting PLAYBOOK under their LinkedIn post. Both of you moved on. It happens 121 times a day — the average number of emails in a working person’s inbox. Your body does the triage before your mind forms an opinion. Skip, skip, skim, close. You don’t decide to ignore most of these. Your nervous system decides for you, the same way it decides a handshake is limp before your brain has time to agree.
Every one of those interactions has something in common — the ask exceeds the trust. A PDF says give me your email and I’ll give you knowledge. A newsletter says subscribe to hear from me forever. Both are proposals — commitments demanded before the relationship has earned them. That’s marriage on a first date.
A man once sent red roses to a woman the day after they met at a dinner party. Then 12 years passed before he could bring himself to propose. He spent those years writing what would become a 900-page treatise on purposeful human action — a book about why people act, how they weigh the cost, what conditions must hold before a human being moves from wanting to doing. He could theorize about action for decades. He could not act on his own heart.¹
The irony is that courtship is not a theory. It is a practice — you show up, you show up again, and you keep showing up until the other person has enough evidence to trust you’ll keep showing up. A proposal can be rejected once. Courtship can be rejected daily, for years. A gated PDF is a proposal: here is everything I know, take it or leave it. Whereas a series of essays delivered to someone’s inbox is a courtship: here is one thing I noticed about your problem — I’ll be back tomorrow with another. One is efficient. The other is vulnerable.
Maybe I was wrong. I spent a year at my cushy marketing job until I realized I could automate my superiors with .md files and earn 10x my monthly wages by using the em dashes they despise so deeply. The people running that content operation had been in marketing for decades. Maybe the numbers that were above my pay grade told a story I couldn’t see from my desk. Even before AI arrived, Forrester estimated that 60-70% of B2B content went completely unused — but that means 30-40% carried the business. Volume has a logic. The marketing funnel has a logic, it is battle tested. Every company in the world uses this model, and they can’t all be deluded.
Then the scale changed. 392 billion emails sent every day. Cold outreach volume is up tenfold in 4 years. Merriam-Webster named slop the word of the year. Consumer preference for AI-generated content collapsed from 60-26% in 3 years, not because people have learned to detect it, but because we can feel the absence of thought like the way we feel a limp handshake.² The glazed eye is not a failure of attention. It is an act of judgment.
George Orwell diagnosed this 80 years ago. Ready-made phrases, he wrote, “anaesthetise a portion of one’s brain.” They “will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you.” He described a speaker who “has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved.”³ That was a human being he was describing, in 1946. Typing enterprise-wide agility in my cushy remote corporate job was the same condition — the brain uninvolved, the sentences assembling themselves from pre-approved scripts. The only thing that changed is that the machine is now literally there to mass-produce what’s already out there.
Claude Shannon defined information as the resolution of uncertainty — not data, not content, but the resolution of uncertainty.⁴ And by that definition, most of the sentences I typed at my “certain” job, like all my tweets from the last 3 years, resolved nothing. Every word was predictable. Predictable words carry zero information — Shannon proved it mathematically. Kutas and Hillyard demonstrated that neural engagement drops toward silence when language follows an expected pattern. Rayner showed that the eyes physically skip words they can already predict — not metaphorically, but measurably, in millimeters of saccade. The more templated the writing, the less of it the reader’s body processes, even when they are staring straight at the page.⁵ Jargon is not failed communication. It is literally performance. Brown and his colleagues at Columbia analyzed 64,000 dissertation titles and found that the heaviest jargon came from the lowest-status institutions. The people who use the most impressive-sounding language are the people who feel least secure about being heard.
The word essay comes from the French essayer — to attempt. Not to generate. Not to optimize. To attempt. Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write by attempting. He took essays he admired, reduced them to short hints, waited days, then tried to reconstruct the original in his own words. He compared his version to the source, found his faults, and started again — content first, then vocabulary, then structure, 3 layers of genuine attempt with a feedback loop at each.⁶ Every attempt resolved a specific uncertainty about his own ability to think clearly on the page. The outcome was not predetermined. That is precisely what makes an attempt information in Shannon’s sense. The resolution of uncertainty requires uncertainty. Software can assemble probable next words. Software can propose. But it cannot attempt. It cannot court.
What memory research proves about spacing — that distributed encounters build retention where a single massive dose vanishes in a day. What neuroscience proves about recognition — that the brain grants trust to familiar voices before it evaluates what they’re saying. What information theory proves about predictability — that a message the reader already expects carries zero information regardless of how polished it is. All of it converges on the same structure. Show up, repeatedly, with something the reader did not predict. Not because this is a marketing technique. Because it is the only way to produce information — to resolve uncertainty that someone actually holds. 5 morning emails in a person’s inbox, each one a genuine attempt at their specific problem, is not a campaign or a mere email sequence that now helps me make 10x my monthly salary in 2 weeks. It is a customer relationship building asset.
I still think about those initials on the black screen. 2 letters where a face should’ve been. Every piece of communication that could have been written by anyone, or by no one, is an interview conducted with a ghost. No face. No voice. No evidence that a human sat with the problem long enough to earn an insight.
The alternative has never been complicated. You sit down. You think about one person. You attempt to reach them with something they did not expect. And tomorrow, you come back and attempt again.
Ludwig von Mises courted Margit Sereny-Herzfeld for 12 years before marrying her in 1938, on the eve of their flight from the Nazis. Margit later wrote: “He was not made for adventures and uncertainties of this kind.” The economist who produced Human Action — 900 pages on the science of purposeful human action — needed over a decade to act on his own heart.
Consumer preference data: Billion Dollar Boy survey, 2023 vs. 2026. “Slop”: Merriam-Webster 2025 Word of the Year. Cold email volume increase: Email Ferret, 2026.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946). I try to explore the same connection between Orwell’s ready-made phrases and corporate language games in The beetle in your box.
Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal (1948).
N400 neural response: Kutas & Hillyard, Nature (1984) — the amplitude of the brain’s semantic response is inversely proportional to a word’s predictability. Eye-tracking: Rayner, Slattery, Drieghe & Liversedge, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (2011). Jargon as status signal: Brown, Anicich & Galinsky, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2020) — 64,000 dissertation titles analyzed across institutions.
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography. He decomposed Spectator essays into short hints, rewrote from memory days later, then turned the prose into verse and back again to develop vocabulary — 3 successive layers of genuine attempt, each with its own comparison and correction.