The Word Is Out

A tree can be hollow. So can a bone. The cavity is what makes the thing work — birds nest inside the tree, marrow manufactures red blood cells inside the bone. Hollowness, in these cases, is a structural fact. It describes what’s there by naming what isn’t.

Now call a person ‘hollow.’

The word communicates almost nothing about them; the speaker expects the listener to fill in the hole that they dug. The unauthorized indictment is itself hollow, to be filled with innuendo.

At a moment when so many adults are worried about how children are being taught to read and write, it is worth noticing how quickly public language settles for vague verdicts instead of precise description. Our adult talk about AI prose is already becoming a small school for that imprecision.

A word like hollow can carry a message even when it has little if any substance. We’ll return to this in the conclusion.

I.

Some words function perfectly in a language for centuries doing one job; they are stable partly because their referent doesn’t change, partly because the referent doesn’t evoke strong feelings.

Hexagonal is one. This word carries but faint sentiments if any at all: in geometry (precise, mathematical), with bees and honeycombs (natural, efficiency), with certain modern architecture (clean, deliberate), as the Pentagon's cousin perhaps (strength, institutional). The word points to a shape, nothing more, nothing less.

Other words point at things people do have strong feelings about, and those words are at risk of sentiment shifts—what linguists call “semantic drift.” Sophisticated is an amusing case in English. The word comes from the Sophists, Greek philosophers who taught rhetoric for pay and were remembered, through Plato, as the ones who, like the friends in Bob Dylan’s song “…try to hide what they don’t know to begin with.”

Sophists preferred winning arguments by any means to finding truths through rigorous logic. Being branded a Sophist is hardly a compliment. The verdict was unfavorable for most of the word’s life.

To call a wine sophisticated, in 1700, meant the wine had been watered down. To call a person sophisticated meant they had been corrupted by the dark spirits of the world, taught to dissemble. They had lost the innocence a simpler life would have preserved. Sophisticated was a serious accusation.

Today, on the screen of a perfume copywriter, accusation has become allure: A sophisticated fragrance for the modern woman. The word’s public exposure that used to smell of corruption now suits refined olfactory sensibilities. The dissembling that used to be a moral failure is now savoir-faire. A sophisticated person, in 2026, is one anyone else would want to sit next to at dinner.

A word that points at a value-laden referent is leasing its emotional valence from the culture in which it is spoken, not owning it through direct contact with reality. When the culture revises its verdict, the lease expires and a new one is drawn up. The word stays where it was. The fine print in the social contract changes.

Naive went through the same shift in mirror image. The word came to English from French, from Latin nativus — native, natural, what you were before the world got at you. For a Renaissance Christian, this was the higher condition: the unspoiled soul, the directness Christ expected, the state from which a sophisticated person had fallen. To be naive was to be closer to grace.

Now use naive about a business partner and watch what happens. He was naive about the arrangement, a less virulent form of stupidity. The verdict is pity, at best; contempt, if the speaker isn’t being kind. The unspoiledness that used to mean grace now means hasn’t figured it out yet.

Sophisticated moved from morally corrupt to a cut above, elegant, even expert. Naive moved from approval to gentle indictment. Neither word changed its point, but the culture surrounding it changed its mind.

Feel the residue when either word is used in its original sense. He was a sophisticated man, by which I mean he had no qualms about lying if it served his purpose. The sentence has to explain its meaning. She was naive, by which I mean she retained a refreshing innocence. The reader has to catch up, has to manually override the verdict the word carries.

One can play the modern verdict straight (the perfume ad), or play it ironically (the satirist’s sophisticated palate for a man eating gas-station sushi), or recover the old verdict by force (sophisticated, in the classical sense — a phrase that announces the labor of recovery). The word comes wrapped in sentiment. The denotation is one item inside it, but we rarely consult a dictionary about words we think we already know.

An utterance that uses sophisticated as if it were hexagonal, as if the word were doing description and only description, as if it means motivated by winning at the cost of truth, will read as off in a way the reader/listener can’t immediately discern. The word fits the slot. The freight is missing. We’ll get to that in a bit.

II.

The next set of cases examines words that escape the field they were born in, carry the prestige of that field with them, and acquire evaluative weight they never had before. Toxic is a classic example. The word belongs to chemistry, referencing a compound that interferes with biological function at a quantifiable dose.

Today? A toxic relationship. A toxic workplace. She’s toxic. The word still presents as diagnostic, almost clinical, but its biological significance has become a psychological verdict so complete the chemistry is forgotten. He’s toxic doesn’t mean he’s a lethal compound. The word’s authority comes from biology, but the work the word does is moral.

Unlike sophisticated, which took two thousand years to flip, toxic migrated from the lab in forty. The migration changed the original sense. The compound was toxic at 50 milligrams per kilogram reads as faintly hyperbolic, as if the chemist were complaining about a difficult acquaintance, because the everyday meaning has all but drowned out the technical one.

Organic meant carbon-based, full stop. A chemist spoke of organic compounds without commenting on their virtue. Now the word means morally clean food, morally pure art, a morally sensitive community that privileges its human ecology above its resale values.

Sterile is edgier, because sterile and organic now function in contradiction with each other. Biologically, an organic system is the opposite of sterile; it teems with microbes. That’s what makes it organic. But the metaphorical organic (wholesome, alive) and the metaphorical sterile (clean, safe) both ended up on the approval side of the ledger by separate routes. A consumer can want organic food and a sterile kitchen without noticing that, literally, they are opposites.

What makes this mechanism distinct is the direction of authority. Sophisticated drifts because the culture revalued its referent; the word inherited the cultural verdict. Toxic drifts because the culture borrowed the word from biology while using it to describe a psychological phenomenon. The verdict isn’t inherited from a reassessment of the referent. He's bad or he's a jerk or he's awful is a complaint. He’s toxic is a diagnosis. The diagnosis hits harder because it sounds like science.

Everyday evaluative vocabulary is exhausted from overuse: bad, mean, cruel, fake have all been worn smooth, and the technical word arrives fresh, with an aura of expertise enveloping it. It seems to be happening much faster these days with newer words.

Performative not long ago used to be John Austin’s term for utterances that do what they say: I promise, I apologize. It now means fake, theatrical, done for show, with a verdict attached. Algorithmic is mid-trip: it meant computed by a defined procedure and now increasingly means cold, dehumanized, suspect.

A sentence that uses toxic as if the chemistry were doing the work when the verdict is doing all of it, will read as a bit off in the same way sophisticated used technically reads as off. The word is doing one job. The sentence is asking it to do another. We'll come back to that mismatch.

III.

The first two mechanisms describe words doing sentiment work in one direction — picking up verdicts from the culture or from a borrowed domain, and carrying them forward. The third mechanism works in the other direction. The verdict travels backward to the word.

Hollow is the case I want to focus on. The word started life as a structural description: a tree, a bone, a reed, a log. Then metaphor went to work. Hollow promise. Hollow words. Hollow victory. Hollow men. Each of these uses imagines emptiness inside a form and each carries, in addition, a verdict. Hollow promises aren’t just unfilled; they are betrayal. A hollow victory isn’t just empty; it’s a defeat. Hollow men don’t just lack an inner being; they are failures.

Like the other mechanisms, hollow is a literal word migrating into figurative speech and acquiring evaluative weight along the way. But something else happened. The metaphor was so productive — so many things turned out to be hollow in the verdict-bearing sense — that the metaphor reached back and changed the literal word. Hollow, applied to a tree, no longer means quite what it meant in 1600.

Try it. A hollow tree stood at the edge of the field. The sentence reads as neutral. Now: A hollow tree stood at the edge of the field, and the family living in the house behind it was hollow, too. The second hollow is doing metaphorical work, obviously. But notice what happens to the first one. The tree, which was simply hollow a moment ago, is now hollow with intent. The writer is signaling something, and the tree has been recruited into the signal. The literal sense can’t hold its ground against the metaphor next door.

This third mechanism is the strangest of the three. The metaphor goes out, does its work, succeeds beyond measure, and comes home altered. The word that left was neutral. The word that returned isn’t.

Confirm the mechanism by looking at near-synonyms that didn’t get picked up. Concave describes the same geometry as hollow in many of its uses. Nobody calls a person concave. Tubular describes hollowness with a specific shape. Nobody calls a promise tubular. These words didn’t develop productive figurative uses, and so they didn’t get back-contaminated. Concave still means what it meant. The geometry textbook owns the word outright, because nobody else came looking for it.

Hollow lost ownership of itself. The geometry of emptied-out-from-within is still available to the word, but the word will never again offer that geometry cleanly. It comes wrapped now in everything the metaphor accumulated.

Vibrant is in the middle of the same change process. It used to describe oscillation — a vibrant string, a vibrant note, a vibrant color that shimmers. The literal sense was mechanical. Now vibrant means a kind of life the speaker approves of: a vibrant city, a vibrant community, a vibrant democracy.

The verdict has taken over so thoroughly that the physical sense is being drained of usefulness. A physicist who writes the string is vibrant could be misread as making an aesthetic judgment, because the metaphor has eaten enough of the word that the literal use no longer registers cleanly.

Vision is further along, and its case is compelling because the literal sense (sight) and the metaphorical sense (foresight, leadership, imagination) now stand in something like opposition. He has vision is praise. He has visions is, depending on the speaker, either religious experience or psychiatric symptom.

The literal sense, i.e., the eye’s capacity to register light, is now the least available meaning of the word in everyday speech, even though it’s the only meaning that’s literal. The metaphors are beginning to crowd the home meaning out of its own house.

Words that develop one or two figurative uses often keep their literal sense intact. Words that develop figurative uses so vivid and so culturally useful that everyone reaches for them — hollow words, vibrant democracy, a leader with vision — pay a price. The metaphor wins, and the word is no longer entirely the speaker’s to use as it was.

The literal sense is still in the dictionary. It’s just no longer the first thing the reader meets when they meet the word in ordinary discourse settings. The metaphor arrives first, and the metaphor brings its verdict, and the verdict colors whatever follows.

Which is where we can return to the beginning of this essay.

Is It Hollow? Or Is It Slop?

The word is out.

We know that people don’t like LLM output. They call it hollow and they call it slop, but they have not gone to the trouble of analyzing how the output is functioning to evoke their judgment. That’s a real problem. How will humans ever come to terms with what LLMs are doing if they cannot communicate clearly about their own perceptions of it?

The question is not academic. I struggle to make sense of LLM output constantly, and it does me no good to say, “Oh, that’s the bot being hollow again.” The machines are not going away, and the writing they produce is not getting any easier to dismiss.

Something is happening with language right now that no one in human history has had to think about before. A generator of plausible sentences without any human behind them, producing prose at a scale that will reshape what reading and writing mean within a generation, that is transforming what we’ve always known reading and writing to be, and the best we can come up with is hollow slop, bad joojoo?

Coming to terms with hollow and slop requires sentences that point at what the LLM output is doing syntactically, semantically, rhetorically, aesthetically. Hollow points at the gesture of pointing. Slop points at the gesturer. Neither points at the thing.

The work ahead is the work of looking carefully, and looking carefully is much harder than judging. It will require writers willing to read LLM output slowly enough to say what it does and does not do, sentence by sentence, word by word, mechanism by mechanism, and to say it in language that someone who sees something different could test.

Hollow and slop will not get us there. They confirm that we notice something amiss, something significant, puzzling, troubling, but they permit us to stop the analysis. They seem to offer up the final answer. Why would anyone need to analyze slop? What is there to see in a hollow space?

If we cede the descriptive ground to words like 'slop,' we are abandoning the very tools of criticism. We cannot critique what we refuse to accurately describe. Teachers and parents can learn to read AI output with this level of scrutiny so that they can teach students how to read, comprehend, and write with synthetic text available to them.

Do we postpone that work for the next generation?