Word of the year 2023, and what a 1902 letter says about the use of language in 2023

Word of the year 2023: Merriam-Webster’s choice was “authentic”. Cambridge Dictionary’s word was “hallucinate”, related to AI’s ability to generate realistic but fake content. Collins Dictionary simply selected “AI”. And, Oxford University Press selected “rizz”, a Gen Z term derived from charisma, referring to an individual’s attractiveness quotient. (Photo by Larissa Farber via Pexels)

It’s been a year in which the meanings of words were shrouded in fog. Democracy, war, and free speech were just a few of them, not to mention others such as self-defence and woke. What’s been clear for a while is that those in power, or hoping to gain it, have always manipulated language to suit their ends. They choose words to skew perceptions and use sentences that emphasise some points and downplay others.

Newspaper reports using the passive voice offer notable examples. For instance, US-based linguist Abdulkader Assad points to a Reuters headline that states: “Issam Abdallah, a Reuters videographer, was killed while working in southern Lebanon.” As Assad emphasises, this headline obscures the crucial fact that Israeli forces killed the journalist.

Those atrocities aside, dictionary selections of words of the year tended to focus on AI and its effects. Merriam-Webster’s choice was “authentic”, to highlight genuineness in a world of artificial experiences. The Cambridge Dictionary’s word was “hallucinate”, related to AI’s ability to generate realistic but fake content. And Collins Dictionary simply selected “AI”, without getting into specifics. (Charmingly enough, however, Oxford University Press went ahead and selected “rizz”, a Gen Z term derived from charisma, referring to an individual’s attractiveness quotient.)

At such a time, chances are that the troubled Lord Philip Chandos would have encountered a familiar situation. The character of Chandos appears in a fictional letter addressed to Francis Bacon in a short piece written by the Austrian author Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1902. In the letter, von Hofmannsthal, who was a feted poet and literary figure in fin-de-siecle Vienna, vividly portrays a disenchantment with language.

At the start, Chandos confesses that he has completely “lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything at all”. Even uttering words like “spirit”, “soul”, or “body” fills him with an inexplicable unease, and he struggles to articulate others that everyone else uses effortlessly. This renders him incapable of offering opinions on court matters, parliamentary events, and the like, as the words needed for such judgements “disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms”.

His world shatters. Words splinter into meaningless fragments, forming “dizzying whirlpools which spun around and around and led into the void”. They turn into “eyes that stared at me and into which I had to stare back”, demanding a response he cannot give. The bridge between inner experience and the external world crumbles, plunging him into an existential abyss.

Because of the way it explores themes of disconnection and alienation, the Lord Chandos letter proved to be highly influential, especially with literary Modernists. It has variously been interpreted as reflecting the anxieties of a new era, the rise of relativism, and even Hofmannsthal's own creative struggles.

John Banville, for one, has written about the way von Hofmannsthal shows that words are bound to things and are at the same time separate from them. As with the present time, “the world-that-we-speak was no longer the world-as-it-is” with language being “a gauze of illusion held up between us and the world of existing things”.

For Chandos, a way out of this predicament lies in forging a new, momentous relationship “with all of existence if we began to think with our hearts”. This means actively seeking and finding beauty in material, everyday reality: “A watering can, a harrow left in a field, a dog in the sun, a shabby churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse—any of these can become the vessel of my revelation”. They can become “sublime and moving”, qualities that words seem too weak to describe.

The character of Lord Philip Chandos appears in a fictional letter addressed to Francis Bacon, in a short piece written by the Austrian author Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1902. (Photo via Pexels/Pixabay)

According to Banville, this Zen-like undertaking involves merging oneself with the objects of reality. One can even draw a line between Lord Chandos’s feelings and the credo of a later poet, William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.”

Whether 2024 will help us to stay grounded in this way or not is another question. Last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice, proclaimed T.S. Eliot – but what remains crucial is the way we respond to the words themselves.