Gimme Shelter: What’s the good word?

It’s time once again for Gimme Shelter to present our annual review of how the English language fared during the year that’s hurrying away from us, and the report brings distressing news.

The language of Shakespeare and Yogi Berra, Emily Dickinson and Rodney Dangerfield, James Joyce and Norm Crosby, had a bumpy 2023. New additions to English, according to Dictionary.com, prove the point: self-coup, latine, rage farming, petfluencer, nearlywed, hellscape, talmbout, cakeage.

Enough said.

Speaking of Norm Crosby, we continue to miss that Zen master in a spotlight wearing a blue tuxedo, wielding a microphone, offering koans such as: “If your eye hurts after you drink coffee, you have to take the spoon out of the cup.”

Monks in Himalayan monasteries are up nights divining the implications of that eternal truth.

Or, as Mr. Joyce would say on Norm’s passing: “And you’ll miss me more as the narrowing weeks wing by. Someday duly, oneday truly, twosday newly, till whensday … Make me feel good in the moontime.”

Where were we? Oh, yes! English and its Discontents.

The Stalinists of Language at Lake Superior State University have not yet issued their annual 2024 “Words Banished from the King’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness” (we’ll hold the front page and stop the presses when it breaks).

But the words and phrases the Lake Superior apparatchiks condemned to the gulag for 2023 seemed to have escaped. Just a few examples of words and phrases that didn’t heed LSSU’s verdict of banishment are “inflection point,” “gaslighting,” “moving forward” and “it is what it is.”

These enemies of the regime are still at large among us, littering every conversation they stroll through.

Those fresh-air deprived geeks at the Oxford University Press took a break from increasingly violent Boggle matches among colleagues to decide that “Rizz” is their “Word of the Year.”

Rizz, for those of you over 17, means a person who has charisma — or maybe a rash? It narrowly defeated, for top honors, “Swiftie” (something to do with a woman who performs in a bathing suit in large auditoriums), and “Situationship,” which the Oxford word nerds have described as an informal sexual relationship.

Informal: The genius of the language is encompassed by this word, meaning it could mean absolutely anything.

The word-maddened wage slaves at Merriam-Webster, occasionally hallucinating from staring into screens for a living (journalists can relate), have declared that “Authentic” was the most looked-up word of 2023. Close to the top of the dictionary’s most searched for word was “Deepfake,” precisely defining the crisis Americans are facing.

As we do each year at this time, we asked David Lozell Martin, the journalist, editor, best-selling author of a dozen novels, as well as one of the finest American memoirs, “Losing Everything,” to weigh in.

The language samurai — do not use “begs the question” incorrectly (as does everyone except Rōnin Martin) around him if you value your head attached to your shoulders.

Mr. Martin picked up the conversation about the important words of 2023, and was not surprised that “authentic” was the most looked-up word. Sir, the floor is yours.

“In a world where falsehoods, shadings of the truth, and fabrications have become commonplace, a reasonable person yearns for the authentic.

“One definition of authentic is genuine or true to the original or not fake. A 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle baseball card will earn you millions of dollars if it is authentic. If it’s fake and you’re selling it as authentic, it might earn you a prison sentence.

“Another meaning of authentic plays more to character. When men and women operate without artifice, they are authentic. Fictional characters appeal to us when they are true to themselves and their beliefs, when they are genuine or authentic.

“Atticus Finch in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ was quietly heroic, doing what he believed was right regardless of what it cost him. He is a pillar of authenticity.

“Lisbeth Salander in ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ showed you didn’t have to be conventional or particularly nice to be an authentic hero.

“Gary Cooper, playing Marshal Will Kane in ‘High Noon,’ personifies authenticity when he risks  everything — his new marriage, his life — to do what’s right according to his moral code. When the character is asked why he doesn’t leave with his wife instead of staying to confront a killer when no one else in town is willing to help him, Marshal Kane puts it plainly and authentically: ‘I’ve got to, that’s the whole thing.’”

“Let’s make it a word and a goal not for a year, but for all time: authentic.”

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

And so, as 2023 has just a few days of life left, remember some advice from Mr. Joyce: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”