White's Kiss of the Yoginī ends on a sentence that is doing more work than its religious context: "Everything becomes Tantra, because nothing is Tantra." The logic: Tantra had a specific hard core (the drinking of the Yoginī's discharge). The sublimation dissolved that core until nothing specific remained — and once Tantra had no differentiating content, the word could attach to anything (any meditation, any energy-work, any "sacred sex"). The emptying of the specific core inflated the word to mean everything. These are the same event: a thing with no boundary expands to fill all space.
This is a general law, not a fact about Tantra. When a term loses its specific, differentiating hard core, it inflates to mean anything — and a word that means everything means nothing. The candidates write themselves: "mindfulness" (a specific Buddhist sati practice → any moment of attention → a corporate wellness buzzword); "wellness" (→ anything sellable); "artisanal," "curated," "authentic," "wabi-sabi," "stoicism" (a specific Hellenistic discipline → "be tough"); even "yoga" itself (White: "Tantric yoga marketed in Hollywood has elided several centuries"). Each had a specific core; each was emptied (commercialized, popularized, universalized); each now means anything — and the emptying is the inflation.
Same-domain: Sublimation of the Five M-Words (where the line appears) and New-Age Tantra as Invented Tradition (the vacuum-filling). Cross-domain: the behavioral-mechanics/business material on false scarcity and brand-dilution — a brand emptied of its specific differentiator (the hard core) inflates into a floating signifier anyone can claim. This wants a cross-domain page or essay: "The Law of Semantic Inflation: How Emptying a Word of Its Hard Core Makes It Mean Everything."
Cross-domain concept page: working title "Everything Becomes X Because Nothing Is X." Core claim: the loss of a term's differentiating hard core and the inflation of its meaning to universality are the same event; ubiquity is the signature of an emptied specificity. Would need: (1) White's case (have it); (2) 2-3 non-religious cases worked out (mindfulness, wellness, a brand); (3) the vacuum mechanism (what fills the emptied word). The mechanism-sentence gate: does this require both the eastern-spirituality case and the behavioral-mechanics brand-theory simultaneously? — probably passes (the semantic inflation needs the religious case; the market dynamics need the brand case; together they make a general law neither domain states alone).
Essay seed: "Ubiquity Is the Epitaph of Specificity" — for a general intellectual audience, on how the words we invoke most have lost their meaning most.
[ ] 2-3 non-religious cases worked out (does the law hold beyond Tantra?) [ ] A second source (a brand-dilution / concept-inflation analysis) touches it independently [ ] The "ubiquity is the epitaph of specificity" formulation survives counterexamples (are there terms that became ubiquitous without emptying?) [ ] Falsifiable: find a term that kept its specific hard core while becoming universal — if none, the law strengthens