In an era of deepfakes and post-truth, as artificial intelligence emerged and Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, Merriam-Webster’s 2023 word of the year is “authentic.”
Authentic cuisine. Authentic voice. Authentic me. Authenticity as artifice.
Searches for the word are common on the dictionary company’s site, but rose to new levels throughout the year, managing editor Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.
“We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” he said before Monday’s announcement about this year’s word. “What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”
Sokolowski and his team don’t delve into the reasons why people turn to dictionaries and websites for specific words.
Rather, they look for data on search spikes and world events that correlate.
This time, there was no particularly big push at one point, but rather a consistency in the growing interest in the “authentic.”
Merriam-Webster’s 2023 word of the year is “authentic.” fake images
This was the year of artificial intelligence, no doubt, but also a time when OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, suffered a leadership crisis.
Taylor Swift and Prince Harry pursued authenticity in their words and deeds.
Musk himself, at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February, urged business bosses, politicians, ministers and other leaders to “speak authentically” on social media by managing their own accounts.
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“Can we trust whether a student wrote this article? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? “We don’t always trust what we see anymore,” Sokolowski said. “Sometimes we don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. “We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance in itself.”
Merriam-Webster’s entry for “authentic” is full of meaning.
There is “neither fake nor imitation: real, actual”, as in an authentic Cockney accent.
There is “true to one’s personality, spirit or character.” There is “worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact.”
There is “made or made in the same way as an original.” And, perhaps most revealing, it is “conform to an original to reproduce essential characteristics.”
“Authentic” follows the 2022 pick of “gaslighting.” And 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of Merriam-Webster choosing an important word.
The company’s data analyzers filter out evergreen words like “love” and “affection” versus “effect,” which always rank high in searches among the 500,000 words it defines online.
This year, wordsmiths also leaked numerous five-letter words because Wordle and Quordle players clearly use the company’s site to look up them while playing the daily games, Sokolowski said.
Sokolowski, a lexicologist, and his colleagues have a group of word of the year finalists that also attracted unusual traffic.
They include “X” (searches spiked in July after Musk’s Twitter name change), “EGOT” (there was a boost in February when Viola Davis achieved that rare quadruple-award status with a Grammy), and “Elemental” , the title of a new Pixar movie that saw a spike in searches in June.
Rounding out the company’s top words in 2023, in no particular order:
Merriam-Webster’s entry for “authentic” is full of meaning. fake images
RIZZ: Slang for “attractiveness or romantic charm” and apparently short for charisma. Merriam-Webster added the word to its online dictionary in September and it has been among the top searches ever since, Sokolowski said.
KIBBUTZ: There was a massive increase in searches for “a farm or communal settlement in Israel” after Hamas terrorists attacked several near the Gaza Strip on October 7. The first kibbutz in Israel was founded around 1909.
IMPLOSION: The June 18 implosion of the Titanic submersible on a commercial expedition to explore the wreckage of the Titanic sent searches skyrocketing for the word, which means “to burst inward.” “It was a story that completely occupied the world,” Sokolowski said.
DEADNAME: There was great interest in what Merriam-Webster defines as “the name a transgender person was given at birth and no longer uses during transition.” The searches followed a flurry of legislation aimed at restricting LGBTQ+ rights across the country.
DOPPELGANGER: Sokolowski calls this “the word of a lover of words.” Merriam-Webster defines it as a “double,” an “alter ego,” or a “ghostly counterpart.” It comes from German folklore. Interest in the word surrounded Naomi Klein’s latest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” published this year. She uses her own experience of often being confused with feminist author and conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf as a springboard into a larger narrative about the crazy times we’re all living in.
CORONATION: King Charles III had one on May 6, causing searches for the word to skyrocket 15,681% from the previous year, Sokolowski said. Merriam-Webster defines it as “the act or occasion of coronation.”
DEEPFAKE: The dictionary company definition is “an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.” Interest spiked after Musk’s lawyers in a lawsuit against Tesla said he is often the target of deepfake videos and again after Ryan Reynolds’ image appeared in a fake AI-generated Tesla ad.
DYSTOPIAN: Climate chaos sparked interest in the word. So did books, movies, and television shows meant to entertain. “It’s unusual for me to see a word used in both contexts,” Sokolowski said.
COVENANT: Searches for the word meaning “a generally formal, solemn, and binding agreement” spiked on March 27, following a deadly mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. The shooter was a former student killed by police after killing three students and three adults.
Interest also increased with this year’s release of “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant” and Abraham Verghese’s long-awaited new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” which Oprah Winfrey chose as a book club favorite.
More recently, shortly after U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson ascended to speaker of the House of Representatives, a 2022 interview with the Louisiana congressman recirculated.
He talked about how his teenage son was then his “accountability partner” on Covenant Eyes, software that tracks browser history and sends reports to each partner when pornography or other potentially objectionable sites are viewed.
INdictment: Former President Donald Trump has been charged with felonies in four criminal cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C., in addition to fighting a lawsuit that threatens his real estate empire.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn