The adjectives that signal nothing

Hi there,

The focus of today’s grammar lesson is a bit more subtle than the usual buzzword rant.

AI didn’t invent bad adjectives. We already had plenty of those. “Innovative.” “Disruptive.” “Best-in-class.” You could build an entire startup deck without saying anything real long before the LLMs rolled into town.

What AI did was take a very specific type of word and push it into everything. Not loudly, not obviously wrong, just… everywhere, all at once.

The result is a word you now see across LinkedIn, decks, websites, conference recaps:

“Serious.”

Serious operators. Serious founders. Serious investors. Serious athletes.

Nobody really spoke like this before. Maybe the odd person did. Now it shows up every day, in every category, across every type of company.

And like most things that spread this quickly in marketing, it’s lost whatever meaning it might have had.

Let’s get to it.

Open LinkedIn and scroll for 30 seconds.

You’ll see some version of it.

• “Spent the week with some of the most serious operators in X.”
• “A room full of serious founders.”
• “Only working with serious partners.”

It sounds like it should mean something. That’s what makes it effective, at least at first. But if you stop for a second and try to understand what’s actually being said, it falls apart pretty quickly.

Serious compared to what? What makes someone serious? Revenue? Experience? Outcomes? Technical depth? Category knowledge? The number of times they’ve done this before? None of that is answered. The word creates the impression of a standard without ever defining one.

Same play as a lot of the AI-generated content we’re seeing right now. It reads like it should land, but when you pause for half a second and try to pin it down, there’s nothing there.

It’s worth naming what this actually is.

Grammatically, “serious” is just a normal adjective. It’s modifying a noun — “operators,” “founders,” “investors.” Nothing wrong with that on its own.

The problem is how it’s being used.

This is an example of a vague status adjective — a word that implies a level or tier without specifying the criteria for getting there. In rhetoric, it’s closest to what’s called a weasel word — a term for language that sounds meaningful but avoids making a real, checkable claim.

You’re not describing the operators. You’re asserting that they meet a standard, without ever telling the reader what that standard is or how it’s measured.

It functions like a filter, but it doesn’t actually filter anything. That’s why it feels off. Your brain is wired to look for the criteria. When it doesn’t find it, it moves on. Do that enough times and it stops looking altogether.

There are a few close cousins worth calling out, because they follow the exact same pattern:

• “Sophisticated investors.”
• “True builders.”
• “Real operators.”

AI is accelerating this in a very predictable way.

The models are extremely good at producing language that signals quality, status, and credibility without needing to understand what actually drives those things in the real world.

“Serious operators” is perfect output. It sounds selective and it requires zero specificity. So it gets used. Then copied. Then repeated. Then it becomes default language. Which is exactly when it stops working.

So what do you do about it?

The first rule is simple, and it catches most of these immediately.

Delete it.

If you remove the word “serious” and the sentence still works, you didn’t need it in the first place.

“Spent the week with operators in sports technology.”

Nothing lost. Arguably clearer.

The second rule is harder, but it’s where you will stand out in your brand voice.

If you feel the need to use the word, there’s usually something underneath it that you’re trying to point to. Some real attribute, some qualification, something that actually differentiates the group you’re talking about.

Your job is to say that thing.

Not “serious operators,” but operators who have scaled from $0 to $50M. Operators who have shipped products used by hundreds or thousands of customers. Operators who have done this before, in this exact category.

Those are filters. They’re specific. They tell the reader something they didn’t know before. They actually do the job you wanted “serious” to do.

This is the broader pattern.

Words that imply a standard without defining it. Words that signal quality without explaining it. Words that feel like shortcuts (because they are, but not the good, Mario Kart kind).

They worked for a while, especially when they were new or used sparingly. Then they got copied, scaled, and flattened. Eventually they stop meaning anything at all.

AI just speeds that entire cycle up. At this point, our brains are probably glossing over these types of posts without even realizing it.

If a word sounds like it’s doing a lot of work, it probably isn’t. Check it. See if you can define it. See if you can replace it with something real.

If you can’t, cut it.

Because the fastest way to lose someone’s attention right now isn’t being wrong. It’s making them think for a second and giving them nothing back.

“Serious” is already there. Get specific, or stop using it.

Yours in marketing, Jeff