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.
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”]
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.
