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The Merriam-Webster word of the year for 2023 is in response to all the nonsense and noise of the current age of post-truth, fake news, deepfakes and artificial intelligence.

Can you guess? Just be real. That’s a hint.

Alright, the Merriam-Webster word of the year for 2023 is ‘authentic’.

Authentic cuisine. Authentic voice. Authentic self. Authenticity as artifice. Searches for the word are routinely heavy on the dictionary company’s site but were boosted to new heights this year, editor at large Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.

“We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” he said ahead of Monday’s announcement of this year’s word. “What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”

Don’t you find it utterly fascinating how culture and society see-saws for change?

Sokolowski and his team choose the word of the year by chasing the data on lookup spikes and world events that correlate. This year there was merely a constancy to the increased interest in ‘authentic’ thanks to a whole bunch of things happening in pop culture.

There’s been a rise in artificial intelligence, with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI suffering a leadership crisis. There have been the likes of Taylor Swift and Prince Harry chasing after authenticity in their words and deeds. There was Elon Musk – oddly – calling heads of companies, politicians, ministers and other leaders to “speak authentically” on social media by running their own accounts.

“Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore,” Sokolowski said. “We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself.”

Ramaphosa, you hearing this?

Merriam-Webster’s entry for ‘authentic‘ is busy with meaning:

Image: Merriam-Webster

‘Authentic’ follows 2022’s choice of ‘gaslighting’, which followed on from the previous three words of the year; ‘vaccine’, ‘pandemic’, and ‘they’.

Sokolowski, a lexicologist, and his colleagues had a bevvy of runners-up for word of the year to choose from that also attracted unusual traffic.

They include “X” (lookups spiked in July after Musk’s rebranding of Twitter), “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 film that had lookups jumping in June.

Rounding out the company’s top words of 2023 were ‘rizz’, ‘kibbutz‘, ‘implode‘, ‘deadname‘, ‘doppelganger‘, ‘coronation‘, ‘deepfake‘, ‘dystopian‘, and ‘covenant‘.

What a time to be alive.

[source:apnews]