A rare weekend update

Because some of you said you wanted more posts from me, and also because so much is happening.

I mostly stay in my lane with this newsletter — brand names, word histories, the language of commerce — but the news so far in this new year has been so overwhelming that I’m going to step outside the boundaries and share some commentary on two of the week’s big stories.

• On the point-blank shooting of Renee Nicole Good, 37, by an ICE agent in Minneapolis: “I am a Minneapolis mother and pastor, and I know where I stand” (The New Republic)

• More on that shooting: “I am the mayor of Minneapolis. Trump is lying to you.” (Jacob Frey, New York Times gift link)

• On the misuses of Elon Musk’s Grok¹ chatbot: “Grok is generating sexual content far more graphic than what’s on X” (Wired)

• “Musk’s main response to his C.S.A.M. [child sexual abuse material] product’s recent popularity has been to express his trademark giddy dim-wittedness, and to otherwise ignore it.” (Max Read, “Why won’t someone do something about Elon Musk?”)

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At its annual word-of-the-year vote, held yesterday in New Orleans, some 300 members and friends of the American Dialect Society selected slop as the overall word of the year for 2025. This AI sense of slop was also selected as the digital word of the year.

I don’t have much to add: I wrote a long post about AI slop back in November 2024, when it was ascendant. Last January the ADS nominated AI slop for a 2024 word of the year; it lost to brainrot. (The overall ADS word of the year for 2024, in case you’ve forgotten, was rawdog.² )

“Have Your AI Slop” T-shirt in Army Green, via the AI Store.

In a press release, the ADS had this to say about slop:

The word slop was recognized for its widespread use for low-quality, high-quantity content, most typically produced by generative AI. While AI slop was a nominee in the American Dialect Society’s 2024 Word of the Year vote, in 2025 slop could stand on its own, with the AI context often implicitly understood. Slop was also recognized as a productive combining form to describe anything of little value generated in mass quantities. . . . “Slop isn’t a new word. It has moved from the pig sty, to the algorithm, and now forms new compounds such as sloppunk, slopification, and friend slop,” Dr. [Kelly Elizabeth] Wright said. “This productivity has no end in sight.”

Indeed, “That’s AI” (“statement of distrust”) won in the Most Useful category at yesterday’s vote.

Here’s the full list of WOTY winners. (Political Word of the Year: icy conditions, from ICE, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” Most Creative: reheat nachos, new to me!) And here’s a piece I wrote for Medium in January 2023 about the various paths to word-of-the-year status (gift link).

For the record, my own word of the year for 2025 remains chaos.

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Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to answer my reader poll and to leave thoughtful, interesting comments. The poll is still open, and I’m still checking responses.

Some of the things I learned:

• As of this writing this newsletter has 2,330 subscribers. The largest response to any of the poll questions was 109 votes, a 4.6 percent response rate. That would be excellent for a direct-mail campaign (a subject I used to know quite a lot about) and meager for an election, even in the United States.

• Fifteen percent of you said you “hate” clicking the little heart symbol on a post. Or maybe you hate the whole concept of “liking” stuff online. Understood, but I am not here to upend the system, folks.

• “Words of the week/year” and “brand-name stories” are in the lead for subjects you’re most interested in.

• You gave a firm thumbs-down to “book reviews,” which honestly surprised and pained me. I like writing book reviews, and I love getting review copies from publishers. Like, for example,

  

I threw in the touchy subject of money — how much would you be willing to pay for a subscription to this newsletter, which I’ve been giving away free? — because it’s a subject much on my mind. Half of you chose the minimum rate, $30 a year, and 32 percent voted for “nothing.” (No one selected the top suggested rate of $100 a year.) At least one of you took the time to explain, in a comment, why you won’t pay for any Substack newsletter. (Thanks, James!) I get it, and believe me, I’ve experienced some angst myself over my choice of platform. But no other newsletter option gives me all the features I prefer, so Substack it will remain for now.

On the other hand, 43 percent of the 46 people who answered — I did the math; that’s 19 of you — said you’d be “tempted to pay for a subscription” if I published more frequently. And here I thought I was pushing it with a twice-a-week schedule!

(More, you say? Here are all of my Substack posts, every last one of them. And watch your inbox, or the Substack app, for more posts next week.)

1. I wrote about grok, the word and the bot, in 2023.

2. To my January 2025 post about rawdog I appended this footnote: “For the record, I still think broligarchy or slop would have been a more accurate representation of the overall tenor of 2024 and beyond.”