"It is impossible to avoid slop these days. Slop is what we now call the uncanny stream of words and photos and videos that artificial intelligence spits out...."

"'Slop bowl'  is the term many use for the nebulous mash of ingredients served up at fast-casual restaurants.... TikTok feeds, meanwhile, are overtaken by streams of 'fast fashion slop.' Thousands of users have embraced the genre of the 'Shein Haul' reveal.... Kyla Scanlon, an economic commentator who coined the term 'vibecession,' notes that across different kinds of consumption... people are choosing to minimize thought and maximize efficiency, even when the outcome is a little less expressive (your outfit is the same as everyone else’s), a little less satisfying (your lunch bowl tastes just like yesterday’s) or a little less human.... Some psychiatrists say it makes sense that being confronted with nonstop online slop comes with cognitive downside.... So now some posters and shoppers are trying to edge away from it...."

Writes Emma Goldberg, in "Living the Slop Life/Slop videos. Slop bowls. Slop clothing hauls. When did we get so submerged in the slop-ified muck?" (NYT).

Sometimes a word helps us perceive and understand and react to a problem. A word can shape or change the problem. Is "slop" accurate? Is it propaganda?

What are the words that have worked like that? Looking back over my decades listening to language in America, I think of "middlebrow," "plastic," "hippie," "punk," "revolution," "yuppie," "hipster," "woke." 

I chose to embed that video to convey the power of the word "plastic" in 1967. If there was one word...

... one thing you got the message you wanted to avoid — in 1967 — it was plastic. The album "Absolutely Free" and the movie "The Graduate" came out that year, and we of the younger generation — we, the Boomers — were edging toward shunning all things "plastic."

But it's just a coincidence that Zappa's spoken-word intro to "Plastic People" seems strangely timely: "The President of the United States! Fellow Americans! He’s been sick. I think his wife will bring us some chicken soup."

No soup for us. Slop bowl.

ADDED: Once upon a time, the Slop was a dance: "Well, you can rock it, you can roll it/Do the slop and even stroll it..." That's the Chubby Checker version of "At the Hop." The more familiar version, by Danny and the Juniors, has "Well, you can rock it, you can roll it/Do the stomp and even stroll it..." You might want to guess that Checker just flubbed the lyrics, but the Slop was one of the 16 dances named in "Land of a Thousand Dances" — along with the Pony, the Chicken, the Mashed Potato, the Alligator, the Watusi, the Twist, the Fly, the Jerk, the Tango, the Yo-Yo, the Sweet Pea, the Hand Jive, the Bop, the Fish, and the Popeye.

That was 1965.