‘The creep of “AI slop” in writing on the arts is everywhere,’ complained the Telegraph’s music writer Ivan Hewett the other week, and it’s up to us readers, he says, to stop it. For others, it means weirdly disjointed videos of anthropomorphic cats. But where did the forceful term AI slop come from?
For prisoners, slopping out meant emptying chamber pots in the morning. For two centuries slop has been swill or food for pigs. At the same time it could be dirty household water. Long before that, it meant unappetising, semi-liquid food.
Sloppy Joes were, from the 1940s, a kind of mushy hamburger (and also a loose-fitting sweater). I remember from the 1960s a probably ironic use of slop in the lyrics of a song by Arthur Lee on Love’s Forever Changes (1967). There the ‘Slop Affair’ is, I think, a nickname for a restaurant called the Eating Affair.
A common idea behind these meanings was that of liquid mud. When the potter applies liquid clay, it is known by the related term slip. Before asphalt and the obsolescence of horses, streets were often sloppy. In Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Sloppy is a character celebrated in Eliot’s line, ‘He do the police in different voices.’ I have seen a claim that Sloppy’s name came from his careless appearance, but Betty Higden, the old woman in the novel who looks after him, says: ‘I always understood he took his name from being found on a Sloppy night.’
I’m not so sure about Dr Slop, the man-midwife, in Tristram Shandy (1759-67). He was responsible for squashing Tristram’s nose at his birth. Any of the connotations of slop would contribute to his ridiculous character. I’d be interested if anyone has a more specific idea about his name. All these slops descend from an Old English word, sloppe, from which derives the innocent-sounding flower-name cowslip. This signifies ‘cow-slobber’ or ‘cow-dung’. Its German folk-name was kuh-scheisse. The same etymology applies to oxlip. For the time being, we suffer from many an AI slip.
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