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language

Taylor Swift at 2022 Toronto International Film Festival Red Carpet Day 2.

The wordsmiths over at Merriam-Webster have announced their official “Word of the Year for 2023,” they say it’s something we are “thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more” than ever.

The word is authentic.

According to the dictionary, the most common definitions of authentic are “not false or imitation,” “being true to one's own personality, spirit, or character,” and “worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact.”

Merriam-Webster says the word saw a “substantial increase” in lookups this year. That’s probably because we now live in a world where artificial intelligence, deepfake technology and questionable memes challenge our basic notions of reality.

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Karl Eccleston and Fiona Pepper star in "Skwerl."

If you are a native English speaker, it is probably hard to imagine what people who don’t speak the language hear when you are talking. “Skwerl,” a short film by Karl Eccleston and Brian Fairbairn, attempts to demonstrate what English sounds like to people who don’t speak the language.

The film was created in 2011 for Kino Sydney, “a monthly open-mic night for filmmakers” based in Sydney, Australia. Since being posted to YouTube 12 years ago, it has received over 52 million views.

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CGI characters speaking Old English, Old Japanese and Hittite.

Given that language evolves so rapidly, it’s hard to imagine what people sounded like 200 years ago, let alone 500 or a thousand. Even when we watch movies about ancient civilizations, the characters usually speak in a language similar to the audience, giving us a false sense of what people in those times were like.

The folks at Equator AI are giving people a realistic idea of what people in ancient civilizations sounded like by recreating the languages of 15 languages that haven't been heard in centuries. In the video, the languages are spoken by computer-generated recreations of people who lived in that era.

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Education

Why do we say 'OK'? It started as an inside joke but blew up when it hit the mainstream.

How a cheesy joke from the 1830s became the most widely spoken word in the world.

A happy woman gives a huge OK sign.

You may be surprised to learn that the universally recognized term for neutral affirmation, "OK," has humble linguistic roots. It all started as a cheesy inside joke amongst Boston hipsters. Back in the 1830s, it was cool among Boston’s intellectual class to intentionally misspell abbreviations. They coined "KC" for "’knuff ced," "OW" for "oll wright," "KY" for "know yuse," and “OK” for "oll korrect."

The abbreviations are similar to Cockney rhyming slang, a form of wordplay where phrases are substituted with rhyming words. For example, a phone is known as the “dog and bone” and stairs are called, “apple and pears.”

"OK" found a mainstream audience after it was first used in an article published in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839. Soon after, the tongue-in-cheek joke spread to newspapers across the country.

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