That’s usually where slop sneaks in. A lot of it has nothing to do with how something was made or what tools were used. You can usually feel the problem somewhere else. The work doesn’t seem to belong to anyone. No one sounds like they’d stand up for it if it missed the mark, or stick with it long enough to make it better.
From 1978 until 1982, the TV show Mork & Mindy was on the air. It showcased the incredible talent of Robin Williams and the near-infinite patience and sweetness of Pam Dawber. It was fine. It was fun. And it was a joy to watch Williams riff on Earth customs as an alien who was clearly enjoying himself more than anyone else in the room.
I remember one episode where Mork was trying to ignite a romantic relationship with Mindy. Someone told him women liked bad boys. So Mork sat down to dinner. Mindy placed a plate in front of him, a meal she had made. Trying to be a bad boy, Mork looked at the food and said, “What is this slop?” Then he grabbed Mindy’s plate, tossed it on the floor, and said, “Oh, look. Déjà slop.”
That made me howl. Of course, Mork learned a lesson. Mindy loved him anyway. All was well.
Cut to 2025, and Merriam-Webster has announced its Word of the Year. The word is “slop.”
They define it as digital content of low quality that is produced, usually in quantity, by means of artificial intelligence. Which is impressive, considering I’ve been writing slop for years and no one has ever given me an award for it. That’s fine. I’m just a humble copywriter.
Still, words don’t become Word of the Year by accident. Merriam-Webster doesn’t wake up one morning and shrug. A word gets there because it shows up everywhere. Because people are searching for it, arguing about it, reacting to it. Because it captures something we all feel but haven’t quite named yet.
And apparently, this year, what we’re feeling is slop.
Enough low-effort, barely considered, mass-produced stuff has flooded our screens that we didn’t just complain about it. We named it. Then we talked about it so much that the dictionary took notice.
I sometimes wonder how the other words react when this happens. Do they get jealous? Do they send congratulatory texts? Do they pretend not to care?
ThoughtLab was able to secure an exclusive interview with 2024’s Word of the Year, as chosen by Merriam-Webster. We’re here with Manifest.
TL: You had a big year. Anything you’d like to say to this year’s word?
Manifest: Don’t let it change you. It’s nice to be recognized, but stay humble. Don’t get a big head. Make sure you have words around you that keep you grounded and real. This kind of fame can really ruin a word.
TL: Solid advice.
Manifest: I’ve known Slop for a while. He’s a great word. Descriptive. Versatile. He had some good moments earlier in his career. That Mork & Mindy episode did a lot for him. Mentioned twice. I just want him to know we’re all proud of him. He deserves this.
In a perfect world, that interview would’ve been real. Maybe a lesser-known word like philomath would’ve chimed in with a mild but pointed objection. Something about nuance. Something about standards slipping. A few years later, Philomath would be on a late-night couch, apologizing. “I said some things. I was in a bad place. Slop and I talked it out. We’re good now.”
None of that will happen. People will forget that 2025’s Word of the Year was slop. If they haven’t already.
But the reason it showed up this year matters more than the word itself.
Slop Isn’t the Problem We Think It Is
The easy explanation is to blame the internet. Or artificial intelligence. Or algorithms. Or the idea that people no longer have the attention span required to engage with anything meaningful. That story is comforting because it gives brands an excuse. If attention is gone, then nothing is really their fault.
But attention hasn’t disappeared. People haven’t stopped paying attention. You can see that anytime something actually feels like someone cared while making it. People give time to things that feel specific, grounded, and owned by someone, even if they don’t fully agree with it yet. What they move past quickly is work that feels like it was made to satisfy a schedule instead of a thought.
That’s usually where slop sneaks in. A lot of it has nothing to do with how something was made or what tools were used. You can usually feel the problem somewhere else. The work doesn’t seem to belong to anyone. No one sounds like they’d stand up for it if it missed the mark, or stick with it long enough to make it better. If it vanished tomorrow, nothing would really change, because it never asked for a place to begin with. No one stops to ask whether something needs to exist, only whether it can be shipped.
This is where the short attention span myth comes from. Brands rush because they assume boredom is always just around the corner. They move on from ideas before they’ve had time to land. When brands keep chasing the next thing, they rarely give anything enough time to settle. Ideas get swapped out before they’ve had a chance to do their work. The result isn’t outrage or backlash. It’s something quieter. People stop expecting much, and they stop engaging in return.
Nothing about the internet suddenly changed its temperament. What changed was how cautiously brands began to act, how quickly they moved on, how little confidence they showed in their own ideas. When attention is treated like something that’s about to vanish at any moment, it doesn’t get handled carefully. It gets spent. That’s usually where the mess starts.
Where Slop Actually Shows Up
It usually doesn’t show up where you expect it. It’s not always the obviously bad post or the awkward campaign that missed the mark. More often, it shows up in work that looks fine at first glance. Clean enough. Thought through just enough to get approved. Easy to scroll past without feeling annoyed or interested either way.
Sometimes it shows up after a few passes at the same idea. The first version sounds sharp. The next one still feels solid. By the third or fourth time around, the language hasn’t become wrong, exactly, but it’s lost whatever made it feel chosen in the first place. It starts to sound like it could belong almost anywhere.
You can feel the same thing happen across longer campaigns. There’s often a strong start, a lot of confidence early on, and then a gradual loosening as things go on. Updates keep appearing, not because there’s something new to say, but because staying visible feels safer than stopping to think.
Most of that comes from understandable pressure. Someone needs to show progress. Something needs to be shared. No one wants to be the reason things slow down. So the work keeps moving forward, even when the idea itself hasn’t really settled. Over time, that habit changes the sound of the work. It becomes more careful. Less distinct. Easier to slide past. The work starts to resemble other work that’s already out there, not because anyone copied it, but because no one slowed down long enough to make it their own. It becomes harder to tell who’s speaking, or why.
What’s tricky is that none of this sets off alarms internally. Things still ship. Metrics still get reported. Nothing obviously breaks. But from the outside, the effect is subtle. The work doesn’t invite much attention because it doesn’t seem to expect any. It feels provisional, like it could be swapped out tomorrow without much discussion.
That’s usually the moment when people start blaming the audience. Attention spans. Algorithms. The platform. Anything other than the possibility that the work itself never fully arrived.
The Difference Between Restraint and Silence
You tend to feel the issue first in conversation, usually when people are trying to be helpful. The same topics circle back around. Someone asks whether it’s time to post again, or whether the message needs a refresh, or whether people might be getting tired of hearing this already. No one is criticizing the work outright. It just starts to feel like it’s moving along without really settling anywhere.
When you’re close to it, that feeling gets louder. Everything sounds familiar because you’ve heard it all before. You know the language too well. You’ve already walked through the reasoning in your head. Changing things up starts to feel productive, even if nothing is actually wrong. New phrasing gets tested, angles shift slightly, something different goes out, mostly because movement feels better than staying with the same thing a little longer.
From the outside, though, most of that repetition barely registers. People aren’t seeing everything. They’re catching pieces of it, out of order, when it happens to cross their path. What feels worn internally often still feels new to them. But that’s hard to trust when you’re close to the work.
So things speed up. Ideas rotate faster. Language changes before it’s had time to settle. The work stays active, but it doesn’t stay with anything for very long. Over time, that motion starts to feel restless rather than confident.
Pulling back doesn’t usually fix that feeling. Going quiet doesn’t usually solve much. It just shifts the discomfort somewhere else. Things feel unresolved rather than settled. The work pauses, but the questions don’t.
You can usually tell when something hasn’t been given enough room. It shows up in how quickly people move past it, or how easily it gets swapped out for the next thing. Nothing hangs around long enough to feel familiar. In that situation, work tends to get changed a lot. Headlines are rewritten. Posts are adjusted after they go out. Campaigns get extended, shortened, or quietly replaced. Language shifts slightly from one version to the next, usually without anyone making a clear decision about it. The work keeps moving, but mostly sideways.
After Enough Small Edits
There’s a particular sound brand work makes when caution starts creeping in. It isn’t obvious at first. Nothing dramatic happens. The language just gets a little more careful. Statements soften. Claims pick up qualifiers. Words that once pointed somewhere specific begin to blur at the edges.
This usually isn’t driven by fear in the abstract. It comes from very practical places. Language changes gradually when a lot of small edits stack up. A line gets adjusted after review. Another gets softened later on. Something is rewritten to avoid questions that might come up in a meeting. Each change makes sense on its own. None of them feels especially important while they’re happening.
After a while, the work starts to sound different. Claims narrow. Sentences get more careful. The tone settles into something that’s hard to disagree with, but also hard to remember. Everything still works on paper. It just doesn’t point very clearly anywhere.
This tends to show up most when brands talk about things they say they care about. The subject is there. The intention is there. The language keeps circling, adjusting, and qualifying. Nothing quite lands. The work stays active, but it doesn’t press into the idea long enough to make it feel solid.
At that stage, teams often respond by changing tactics. New phrasing. New angles. Small resets meant to freshen things up. The underlying approach stays the same, though, so the tone doesn’t really shift. It just moves around.
Confidence usually doesn’t disappear all at once. It thins out. The work starts leaving itself room to retreat. Over time, that becomes the dominant sound.
That provisional quality is easy to mistake for flexibility. In practice, it often just makes the work harder to recognize. Each piece exists on its own, without much connection to what came before. People might agree with it in the moment, then forget it almost immediately.
This is usually the point where teams start looking for fixes. New formats. New platforms. New language. Something that might change the response. Rarely does anyone suggest staying with the same idea a little longer and letting it show up again, unchanged.
Staying put can feel risky in those moments. It can feel like doing nothing. But more often than not, it’s the only way to find out whether the work actually has a center, or whether it’s been moving just to stay in motion.
What We Look For at This Point
By the time work reaches this point, a lot is usually happening around it. Language gets revised. Formats shift. New approaches get tested alongside older ones. Pieces are updated, reworked, or swapped out as teams look for something that changes the response.
This is usually the moment when we stop talking about what to add and start paying attention to what’s already there. Not in a strategic sense. More in a practical one. What language keeps showing up. What ideas keep getting introduced and then dropped. Where things start to sound cautious without anyone meaning for them to.
A lot of the time, the issue isn’t that the work is unclear. In practice, this shows up during review. Sentences get adjusted so they can be revisited later. Certain words are avoided because they might raise questions. Lines are rewritten to make sure they can survive another round of feedback. Nothing stays fixed for long, even after it’s been approved once.
The next piece usually starts from that same place. Similar changes get made. Similar language gets carried forward. Over time, the work begins to share the same looseness, even when the topic changes. The work stays flexible, but it also starts sounding less settled with each pass. Nothing feels obviously wrong, but nothing feels settled either. That’s usually when we stop looking at individual pieces and start looking at what the work is avoiding.
Sometimes it’s avoiding specificity. Sometimes it’s avoiding repetition. Sometimes it’s avoiding the risk of being clear about what matters more than everything else. Those avoidances don’t announce themselves. They show up in the same edits happening over and over, across different projects, regardless of topic.
At this stage, we’re not trying to sharpen language yet. We’re trying to understand what the work is protecting itself from. That question tends to explain more than any brand audit ever could.
Once that’s visible, the next step is rarely dramatic. It’s often about choosing one idea to stay with instead of three to test. Letting a sentence remain slightly uncomfortable rather than smoothing it out. Keeping language that feels a little exposed because it actually belongs to the brand saying it.
None of that feels efficient in the moment. It usually slows things down. But it changes how the work behaves over time. Fewer ideas enter the system. The ones that do tend to stick around longer. Language stops shifting just to prove that progress is being made.
From that point on, the work tends to change less from piece to piece. Fewer new elements get introduced at once. Language carries over more often. Decisions made in one place show up again later, instead of being reworked every time something new is made.
Why the Word Showed Up at All
The fact that “slop” became a word people started using says more than the definition ever will. No committee needed to invent it. People reached for it because they needed a way to point at something they were already seeing and feeling, even if they couldn’t fully explain it.
Most of the time, those words don’t come from theory. They come from repetition. People start using a word after they’ve seen the same thing show up repeatedly. It becomes a way to refer to something without explaining it each time. The word spreads because it’s convenient, not because it’s precise.
“Slop” began circulating in that way. It started appearing in conversations, posts, and headlines as a catch-all. Different kinds of work ended up labeled the same way, regardless of how they were made or why they existed. Content that technically existed, but didn’t seem to belong anywhere in particular.
Once a word like that starts circulating, it tends to flatten things. Everything gets pulled into the same bucket. Careful work and careless work sit side by side. Intent disappears. Nuance gets lost. That’s usually when conversations about quality stop being useful.
At that point, the word becomes less important than the behavior that prompted it. Not because the behavior is new, but because it crossed some invisible threshold. Enough of it accumulated that people stopped trying to describe it precisely.
Slop isn’t a diagnosis. It’s what shows up when precision leaves the room.
The Takeaway
At ThoughtLab, we often enter work after content is already in motion. Language exists across multiple pieces. Decisions have been made, revised, and revisited. Teams are actively producing and responding to feedback as it comes in.
Our focus is on what’s present. We look at how language appears across different pieces, what phrasing repeats, and where elements shift. Some decisions carry through. Others are reopened. New work is often built using material that already exists elsewhere, even when the pieces were not planned together.
We pay attention to how those patterns show up during review and production. What gets adjusted. What stays in place. What resets from one piece to the next? The work is examined as it is, without assuming direction or intent.
That posture guides how we approach situations like this, not as a response to a label or a moment in time, but as part of how we engage with work that’s already underway.
