Calais poet Geof Hewitt has been entertaining Vermonters with his wit, wisdom and love of language for decades. The state’s reigning slam poetry champion, he enjoys spreading the word by hosting poetry slams and introducing others to the fun of slamming — competitive performance poetry that is fun, lively, dramatic and sometimes loud.
But in quieter moments, Hewitt writes poems. “Just Worlds,” one of his four books of poetry, takes its title from a charming, two-line verse inside it, “Typographical Errors.” “Don’t let them bother you, she said. After all, those are just worlds.”
Aren’t they, though? Words can be so much more than mere letters on a page. The connection the speaker makes when she muddles “words” and “worlds,” emphasizes their potential depth and power. Sometimes specific words rise above others and seem to capture something about where the world is right now, about our shared joy, fear or bewilderment.
In that light, each December, some publishers announce their choice for word of the year. Some of the words are fun and some are serious, but each represents something special at this moment in history.
The words selected by Merriam-Webster and the Oxford University Press always get the most publicity, and I will get to them in a minute. But all eight publishers’ selections I looked at mentioned artificial intelligence or related words, with four of them putting a technology term on top, so that’s where I’m going to start. Maybe I’ll go for a walk and let my computer take it from here. How will you know?
Collins Dictionary selected AI — short for artificial intelligence — as its 2023 word of the year, defining it as “the modeling of human mental functions by computer,” and noting, in particular, its use in writing and creating images. It was used in producing a new Beatles song and was at the heart of the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes.
“Nothing can stop technology from dominating this year’s words,” The Economist wrote in explaining its selection of Chatgpt. “The breakthrough in particular of large language models has been stunning. They produce prose so human-like that they have ignited a debate about whether (they) are actually thinking (and whether students will ever do homework without them again).”
The Economist noted that “generative AI” is the more encompassing term for programs that “can churn out text and images with only some simple prompts,” but that they selected the specific name, Chatgpt, because they said it is more commonly used.
For their word of the year, both the Cambridge Dictionary and Dictionary.com selected hallucinate — which describes when artificial intelligence produces false information. Hallucinate “gets to the heart of why people are talking about AI,” Cambridge said, adding that it shows what a powerful tool it is, with both strengths and weaknesses.
Dictionary.com expanded on the importance of AI: “When we look back on 2023 from whatever surreal future it forks into, we’ll remember it as the year that at least this much became clear: AI will forever change how we work, learn, create, interact with (mis)information, and think about ourselves.”
“Hallucinate as our 2023 Word of the Year,” it continued, “encapsulates technology’s continuing impact on social change, and the continued discrepancy between the perfect future we envision and the messy one we actually achieve.”
Dictionary.com listed five runners-up, and with each, explained its significance in terms of what was going on during the year: strike, rizz, wokeism, indicted and wildfire. With wildfire, for example, it wrote: “This year’s devastating wildfires in Maui, Canada and in many other parts of the world were some of the latest examples of how much climate change is contributing to extreme weather events and a new potency in the terms we use to refer to them.”
Merriam-Webster came down on the opposite side of hallucinate, selecting “authentic” as its top word. Often connected to identity, authentic can mean “not false or imitation” or “true to one’s own personality, spirit or character.” Also making a connection to AI, among its runners-up, Merriam-Webster listed deepfake — an altered image or recording that “misrepresents someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.”
Noting the rare achievement that actress Viola Davis attained in February, Merriam-Webster included EGOT, the distinction of winning an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.
Ironically, the list that was most highly influenced by popular culture may be that of the Oxford University Press, publishers of the staid Oxford English Dictionary — affectionately and more conveniently known as the OED — the largest and one of the more “academic” English language dictionaries. Notably different from other lists, in addition to considering statistical information about various measures of word frequency, Oxford considered votes by the public, and if there’s anything the public likes, it’s celebrity.
The Oxford word of the year is rizz, short for charisma, and meaning “pertaining to someone’s ability to attract another person through style, charm or attractiveness.” The popularity of the word took off after a widely reported June 2023 interview in which actor Tom Holland was asked about his rizz. He answered, “I have no rizz whatsoever, I have limited rizz,” which fans of the handsome, charming actor thought was outrageously funny.
Besides being a noun, it can be used as a verb, as in “rizz up,” meaning to attract, seduce or chat up (a person).” Of course, the first thought that serious Scrabble players had, and the reason they had read to the end of this piece, was that there’s a new z-word — with two zees, no less, although the game has only one, so you need to have a blank, also. Since it’s a verb, presumably, rizzes, rizzed and rizzing will work.
Swifties — enthusiastic fans of singer Taylor Swift — are undoubtedly puzzled about how she could come in second in anything. After Swift had the first billion-dollar-grossing music concert tour ever and was named the Time Person of the Year, how could Swiftie only be a runner-up for word-of-the-year on lists?
Don’t let it bother you, music fans. After all, these are just words.
Tom McKone lives in Montpelier.
