Be TwiXt and Between

Solving the problem of having to use more words than necessary to refer to a post/comment at X formerly known as Twitter, let’s economize breath wise and reduce the phrase to one word “twiXt” with an emphasis on the X. In April Musk renamed his $44 billion dollar twitter toy “X.” Are we obliged to continue this 7 months waste of time and type in the same way we were obliged for 7 years when referring to

an artist formerly known as Prince?

For example if one has commented, to be brief, let’s say they twiXted a “twiXt” on TwiXter and be done with it.

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Bye Bye Georgy Boy

Hey there, Georgy boy
Swingin’ down the street so fancy-free
Everybody you met could always see
What lies there were
Inside you

Hey there, Georgy boy
There’s another Georgy deep inside
Bring out all the grift you hide
And, oh, what a change there’d be
The world could see
A new Georgy boy

A George Santos 15-foot-high balloon by @MoveOn was tumbling around Capitol Hill ahead of the vote to kick him out of Congress.

[apologies to Jim Dale, lyricist of “Georgy Girl”]

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Spread the Word

Attribution: WORD OF THE YEAR by Randall Enos, Easton, CT

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is ‘authentic.’ That says a lot about 2023 : NPR

If what we search for is any indication of what we value, then things aren’t looking great for artificial intelligence.

“Authentic” was selected as the 2023 word of the year by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, landing among the most-looked-up words in the dictionary’s 500,000 entries, the company said in a press release Monday.

After all, this was the year that Chat GPT disrupted academic integrity and AI drove Hollywood actors and writers to the picket lines.

[…]

2023 was the year that authenticity morphed into performance, its very meaning made fuzzy amidst the onslaught of algorithms and alternative facts. The more we crave it, the more we question it.

This is where the dictionary definition comes in.

“Although clearly a desirable quality, authentic is hard to define and subject to debate — two reasons it sends many people to the dictionary,” Merriam-Webster said in its release. Look-ups for the word saw a “substantial increase in 2023,” it added.

For a word that we might associate with a certain kind of reliability, “authentic” comes with more than one meaning.

It’s a synonym for “real,” defined as “not false or imitation.” But it can also mean “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character” and, sneakily, “conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features.”

This may be why we connect it to ethnicity (authentic cuisine or authentic accent) but also identity in the larger sense (authentic voice and authentic self). In this age where artifice seems to advance daily, we’re in a collective moment of trying to go back, to connect with some earlier, simpler version of ourselves.

[continues]

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