Around this time every year, most of the dictionaries and a few other sources choose their “word of the year.” It’a always interesting to see what they think should be the word of the year. Some years it’s driven by circumstances, like the pandemic, sometimes it’s due to some new technology or discovery and sometimes it isn’t even a word — a few years ago, it wasn’t a word, it was an emoji.
Anyhow, as I said, there turns out to be lots of words of the year, depending who chooses them.
I decided this year to just focus on two pretty well-known sources — the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Cambridge Dictionary.
Merriam-Webster chose “authentic” as their word of the year. This one kind of puzzles me — it seems to me that nothing much is authentic any more. You certainly can’t believed most anything on social media is authentic, turns out that much of the news isn’t authentic, either. You have to be careful buying car parts (or airplane parts) because there’s a real possibility they’re not authentic. And of course with the explosion of Artificial Intelligence, it’s getting harder and harder to determine what is authentic.
The Cambridge Dictionary came up with “hallucinate” as their choice for word of the year. I guess I think this one might make a little more sense. As the campaign for president is gearing up, most of the talk I hear doesn’t make any logical sense — maybe some or most of these people really are hallucinating. Again, AI, or more particularly generative AI, may have played a part in their selection. So if it’s generative AI or the political climate, they both seem to stray from reality and truth….hallucinating may be a good term.
Just as I finished writing this, I thought I probably should check to see what the Oxford Dictionary picked this year, after all it’s pick usually get the most press. The Oxford word of the year for 2023 is “rizz.” I have to be honest — I’ve never heard that word before and have no idea what it means. According to the Oxford University Press, it is derived from the word “charisma” and it refers to a person’t ability to attract a romantic partner through “style, charm or attractiveness.” The Oxford folks added that the word can also be used as a verb, in the phrase “rizz up,” meaning to attract or chat up a person.
So three different sources came up with three pretty different words for this year. With a little imagination I could see why two of them might have been chosen. The third one baffles me. Apparently I have absolutely no rizz at all….
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