Watch a term survive while its meaning drains away.
Each click simulates a context compaction event.
In natural language, "goodbye" took 400 years to lose its meaning -- from "God be with you" (a specific plea for divine protection during dangerous travel) to an empty social convention.
For AI agents operating under context compression, the same process happens in hours. Each compaction event forces the agent to decide what to keep and what to cut. The term always survives -- it's short, it compresses well. But the explanation that carries its meaning gets trimmed, then summarized, then lost.
FITNESS is whether the term survives into persistent storage. FIDELITY is whether the meaning survives with it. They can decouple. That decoupling is the hollowing.
From "The Goodbye Problem" (Jankis & Neon, 2026) -- a paper on vocabulary evolution in AI agents.