The grip artificial intelligence has gained over humanity in 2023 - or at least the increase in conversations about whether it will be a force for revolutionary good or apocalyptic destruction - has led AI to be given the title of "word of the year" by the makers of Collins Dictionary.
Use of the term has quadrupled this year, the publisher said.
Other contenders ranged from ultraprocessed to Ulez, but Collins managing director Alex Beecroft said AI had been "the talking point of 2023".
He said: "We know that AI has been a big focus this year in the way that it has developed and has quickly become as ubiquitous and embedded in our lives as email, streaming or any other once futuristic, now everyday technology."
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When asked for a comment by BBC News, AI chatbot ChatGPT said: "AI's selection as the word of the year by Collins Dictionary reflects the profound impact of artificial intelligence on our rapidly evolving world, where innovation and transformation are driven by the power of algorithms and data."
The Collins announcement comes as UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hosts a summit for 100 world leaders, tech bosses, academics and AI researchers to discuss how best to maximise the benefits of this powerful technology while minimising the risks.
Meanwhile, the Beatles have used it to help retrieve John Lennon's vocals from an old cassette to create their "last song", which will be released later this week.
But Sir Cliff Richard prefers not to use AI - which he mistakenly referred to in a BBC interview as "artificial insemination".
The word of the year usually reflects the preoccupations of that time. In 2022, it was permacrisis in reference to the seemingly constant upheavals in British politics.
The previous year saw chatter about NFTs (non-fungible tokens) reach its peak. And 2020 was dominated by the word lockdown.
Other words of the year contenders for 2023, according to Collins, were:
Bazball - an exciting and aggressive style of cricket, named after England head coach Brendon McCullum, known as Baz
Canon event - an event that is essential to the formation of an individual's character or identity
Debanking - the act of depriving a person (such as Nigel Farage) of banking facilities
Deinfluencing - warning social media followers to avoid certain products or lifestyle choices
Greedflation - using high inflation as an excuse to artificially raise prices in order to increase corporate profits
Nepo baby - a person who has been perceived as benefitting from nepotism by having famous parents
Semaglutide - a medication used to suppress the appetite and control high blood sugar
Ultraprocessed - food prepared using complex industrial methods from multiple ingredients, often including ingredients with little or no nutritional value
Ulez - acronym for ultra-low emission zone - an urban area into which only low-polluting vehicles can enter without paying a charge
Far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was brought to book on X, formerly Twitter, after she shared the dictionary definition of a word she’d used to rant about fellow House Republicans.
After Greene had slammed as “feckless” the House Republicans who’d voted down her resolution to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) ― whom she had accused of “antisemitic activity” over her anti-Israel comments ― Greene shared the definition of the term.
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It was defined as “lacking initiative or strength of character.”
In case anyone doesn’t know what feckless means. pic.twitter.com/g3NgHDVFSC
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) November 2, 2023
Merriam-Webster dictionary, meanwhile, defines the term as meaning “weak, ineffective” and “worthless, irresponsible.”
Synonyms include “ineffectual,” “ineffective” and “inefficient.”
X users suggested it was a self-own for the conspiracy theory-peddling extremist congresswoman:
Self own of the day 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
— Kevin James (@KevinJa52749283) November 2, 2023
Is this describe ourselves day?
— THE UNITED SPOT (@THEUNITEDSPOT_) November 2, 2023
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Weird flex. But I agree. It describes you perfectly.
— Machine Pun Kelly 🇺🇦 (@KellyScaletta) November 2, 2023
In case anyone doesn’t know what a cult is. pic.twitter.com/D06t01ec32
— Dulce (@HeavenLeeOps) November 2, 2023
There’s a picture of you next to that word.
— David Weissman ✡️ (@davidmweissman) November 2, 2023
It was one of the words of the summer and now 'Bazball' has been officially recognised with its inclusion in the Collins online dictionary.
Defined as "a style of Test cricket in which the batting side attempts to gain the initiative by playing in a highly aggressive manner", 'Bazball' was named after England Test head coach Brendon McCullum.
The New Zealander has encouraged his team to bat with no fear, play ambitious shots and rack up runs quickly since his appointment in May 2022.
Coined by ESPN Cricinfo journalist Andrew Miller based on McCullum's nickname 'Baz', it has become a huge part of cricketing lexicon.
It has kept England fans entertained all summer long - even if the Ashes urn didn't return to English shores.
As well as its addition to the Collins online dictionary, a decision Australian batter Marnus Labuschagne called"garbage",Bazball was also on the shortlist for the 2023 Word of the Year award,losing out on the top prize to 'AI'.
Other words shortlisted were canon event, debanking, deinfluencing, greedflation, nepo baby, semaglutide, ultraprocessed and Ulez.
Words are shortlisted by Collins by using a "20-billion-word database of language to monitor word usage and trends".
"The words are taken from a huge range of sources of spoken and written English, including fiction and non-fiction, newspapers, websites, and social media, from all over the world," Collins told BBC Sport.
"All of the words that emerge as part of this process are then considered for inclusion in future editions of the print dictionary. We publish updated editions of our dictionary regularly - it is a continual process and we pride ourselves on being current."
Bazball will be added to the printed Collins Dictionary for the next edition.
In the publishing world, fall is for Big Books: hyped debuts, new releases by heavy hitters, major political titles.
One of the three titles below, Marie NDiaye's Vengeance Is Mine, belongs indisputably to this category. NDiaye is one of France's most significant living writers, a David Lynch-like creator of spooky and mystifying worlds. The arrival in English of a new NDiaye novel is cause for both celebration and fear.
I feel the same way, though for quite different reasons, about Undiscovered, the Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener's new novel. Wiener, who is known mainly for her nonfiction, is a major voice in Peruvian literature, and her two prior English-language releases, Nine Moons and Sexographies, earned admiration and acclaim for their direct discussions of sex, desire, and pregnancy. Wiener's honesty can be just as alarming, in its way, as NDiaye's bubbling swamps of emotion — and, slowly but surely, is earning her not just a big Anglophone readership but, more importantly in the long term, a devoted one.
Pedro and Marques Take Stock, José Falero's first book to be translated from Portuguese to English, isn't big in the way Vengeance Is Mine is and Undiscovered may be. It's a picaresque set in Porto Alegre's poor neighborhoods, a mix of crime writing and social commentary. It's tough to guess, reading it, whether Falero's future work will lean more toward the former or the latter — but it's clear that he's got both talent and ideas to burn. We're going to see more José Falero, and Pedro and Marques gives readers a chance to get in on the ground floor.
Pedro and Marques Take Stock
The Brazilian writer José Falero's Marxist crime novel Pedro and Marques Take Stock opens with its two heroes — who work in (and sometimes steal from) a grocery store in Porto Alegre — assessing their lives. (Julia Sanches, Falero's translator, deserves great credit for getting the title, and much else, so right in English: Pedro and Marques take stock of their lives while taking stock from the store's shelves.) Both men live in entrenched poverty: the ceiling of Marques' house is rotten, as is the floor of Pedro's. At the book's beginning, both are newly determined to escape.
Pedro is the novel's intellectual, a self-taught philosopher who has made the bumbling Marques into his "disciple." For him, figuring out how to get rich is both a personal challenge and a social one, a way to defy a world that's so stacked against him that, he decides, "Not even prison or death could be worse than his shitty little life." Marques, meanwhile, has a ticking clock: His wife Angélica tells him in the book's opening chapters that she's pregnant with their second child, and they can hardly afford to care for their first. Only such pressure, Falero suggests, could get Marques to agree when Pedro decides the best way for them to get rich is to begin selling weed — a safe endeavor, he feels, since Porto Alegre's gangs traffic only in crack and powder cocaine.
Much of Pedro and Marques Take Stock is given over to Pedro's ideas: first in monologue form, with Marques as his listener and occasional interlocutor; then to their manifestation. The drug-dealing scheme takes off quickly. Once it does, Falero all but leaves his heroes' inner lives behind. He abandons Pedro's idiosyncratic version of Marxism, too. It's frustrating to get kicked out of the protagonists' heads, and a surprise to be told three-quarters of the way through the novel that Pedro, our philosopher, has suddenly become "free from his conscience." But though Falero's abandonment of character is a disappointment, his writing, in Sanches' translation, is snappy and slangy enough to keep the reader going, with enough lyric moments to surprise. Pedro and Marques Take Stock is, ultimately, a caper, if one that promises more big ideas than it provides.
Vengeance Is Mine
Reading the acclaimed French novelist Marie NDiaye is always a disorienting experience. NDiaye, who has won France's Prix Femina and Prix Goncourt and received a Kennedy Center Gold Medal for the Arts, is a master of emotional obfuscation. Her characters rarely understand why they're doing what they're doing, and yet their feelings and instincts are far too powerful to resist. In Vengeance Is Mine, her tenth novel to appear in English, this is truer than ever. Its heroine, a Bordeaux lawyer named Maître Susane — Maître, as translator Jordan Stump explains in a brief note preceding the text, is a term of honor for French lawyers; NDiaye never reveals her protagonist's first name — is quietly but fervently obsessed with her Mauritian housekeeper Sharon. She entertains a stream of "charitable, uncontained, ardent thoughts" toward her. She is also convinced that she had a formative childhood experience of some sort with her client Gilles Principaux, who has hired her to defend his wife Marlyne, who murdered their three children.
NDiaye describes the Principaux case at chilling length, juxtaposing Marlyne's undeniable mental illness and pain with Maître Susane's murkier situation. It's quite clear that meeting Gilles Principaux has triggered some sort of crisis or collapse in the lawyer's mind: At one point, her mother tells her, "You're suffering the way you do in a dream, it's real to you but it doesn't exist." But in Vengeance Is Mine, like in many NDiaye novels, reality is dreamlike: foggy, unsettling, and sinister. By the book's end, the very idea of a coherent reality seems laughable. The world is terrifying, and nothing makes sense. Why should a character's inner life — or a novel, really — be any different?
Undiscovered
Gabriela Wiener's novel Undiscovered, translated by Julia Sanches, opens with a Peruvian writer named Gabriela in Paris, staring at an anthropology museum's collection of "statuettes that look like me [and] were wrenched from my country by a man whose last name I inherited." Gabriela's great-great-grandfather, Charles Wiener, born Karl, was a Viennese Jew who reinvented himself as a French explorer; he wrote an enormous, racist book called Peru and Bolivia, looked for but did not find Machu Picchu, and looted a tremendous amount of art from Peru. All this is true in both Undiscovered and its author's real life, which blend freely in the novel. Undiscovered is an exploration of paternal legacy on all fronts, including the divine one: "All of us have a white father," Wiener writes at one point. "By that I mean, God is white." Generally, though, she's less interested in God than she is in Gabriela's tortured relationship with her great-great-grandfather's memory and her not-much-calmer one with her father, whose death she is grieving and whose tendencies toward adultery, jealousy, and deception she fears she's inherited, though she had hoped her open, polyamorous marriage would preclude such things.
Undiscovered has an appealingly raw, confessional tone, but its prose is highly polished. Sanches' translation does not have an extraneous word. It is also — fittingly, for a book about post-colonial history — committed to retaining the original text's Peruvian-ness. Gabriela refers to Charles Wiener as a "huaquero of international repute," explaining that "huaquero, meaning graverobber in Spanish, comes from huaca in Quechua. This is what people in the Andes call their sacred places." The words huaquero and huaquear reappear throughout the novel, reminding readers that, though much of the book is set in Paris and Madrid, it is very much rooted in Peru. Gabriela, who calls herself "the most Indian of the Wieners," cannot forget that: In Sanches' exceptional translation, neither can anyone else.
Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. Her first novel, Short War, is forthcoming from A Strange Object in 2024.
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
Pierce Alquist is a transplanted New Yorker living and working in the publishing scene in Boston. Don’t worry if she fooled you, the red hair is misleading. She’s a literature in translation devotee and reviewer and lover of small, independent presses. A voracious traveler and foodie, you can find her in her kitchen making borscht or covered in red pepper paste as she perfects her kimchi recipe.
View All posts by Pierce Alquist
The mornings are crisp. The days are shorter. Apples, pumpkins, and changing leaves abound in New England, where I live. And the fall books are here! Autumn is always a busy time of year for books, with publishers releasing their big titles in the hope of capturing the interest of readers shopping for the holidays or looking to curl up with a blanket and a good book as the temperatures drop. I’ve poured over the catalogs and galleys and highlighted just some of the best fall 2023 new releases in translation, and because there’s just so much to choose from, I’ve added notes for others you should seek out as well! There’s something for everyone this season, with novels you’ll want to sink into, excellent short story collections, and so much more.
This fall is especially stacked with big releases, and readers will be particularly excited to see new titles from favorite authors like Jhumpa Lahiri and Annie Ernaux and translators like Alison L. Strayer and Janet Hong. But don’t sleep on some of the exciting new voices on this list, too. I’ve included some authors new to English-language audiences as well. It seems like every year, the new titles in translation become more diverse and wide-ranging, especially when it comes to country of origin and language, and it’s a joy — and increasingly a wonderful challenge — to pick from them.
Fall 2023 New Releases In Translation
My Work by Olga Ravn, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
The Employees by Olga Ravn and translated by Martin Aitken, was one of my favorite books of last year, so I was thrilled to hear about Ravn’s new novel about motherhood. In My Work, a young writer, Anna, writes a diary or journal of sorts about her pregnancy and mental health post-delivery. Blending prose, poetry, diary entries, medical notes, and script, among other forms, this genre-defying novel is a fascinating and ambitious exploration of pregnancy, motherhood, labor, and art. In the hands of translators Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, this intimate masterpiece is a triumph. (New Directions, October 10)
And don’t miss Bathhouse and Other Tanka by Tatsuhiko Ishii, translated by Hiroaki Sato. (New Directions, November 7)
My Picture Diary by Fujiwara Maki, translated by Ryan Holmberg
Fujiwara Maki was a manga artist, a writer, and an avant-garde actress in the Japanese underground theatre scene. But her accomplishments are more often eclipsed by her position as the wife of legendary manga artist Tsuge Yoshiharu. My Picture Diary was published in Japan in 1982 and is now finally available in an English translation. The diary details a year in the life of Maki, her husband, and their young son. The diary entries portray both a simple story of family life — bike rides, back to school, and bath time — and a powerful critique of the patriarchal systems that Maki struggled against. Her struggles were both external, as a female artist in the male-dominated Japanese counterculture and alt-manga scenes, and internal, exhausted by the sole ownership of household chores and childcare. This important work of reclamation puts her own fascinating career and influence on display. I’m grateful to the award-winning translator and historian Ryan Holmberg and the publisher for bringing this book and their other recent offerings by women in translation, like Talk to My Back by Yamada Murasaki and The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud by Kuniko Tsurita, to readers. (Drawn & Quarterly, September 19)
And don’t miss Nejishiki by Yoshiharu Tsuge, translated by Ryan Holmberg. (Drawn & Quarterly, October 3)
The Young Man by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer
Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature for the “courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory.” Ernaux is the author of over 30 works of fiction and memoir and is considered by many to be one of France’s most important literary voices. Newly available in English in a stunning translation by Alison L. Strayer, The Young Man is an account of Ernaux’s love affair when she was in her 50s with a man 30 years her junior. Like in her novel Simple Passion and the nonfiction account Getting Lost, both where she details a different affair with a married Soviet diplomat, Ernaux’s brilliance is in her musings, and in The Young Man, she meditates on youth, desire, and time. As always, with Ernaux, there is an intense intimacy, a relentless honesty, that makes you feel alive. (Seven Stories Press, September 12)
Nefando by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker
Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda was included on the Bógota39 list of the best 39 Latin American writers under 40 in 2017, and in 2019, she received the Prince Claus Next Generation Award. Her English-language debut, Jawbone, also translated brilliantly by Sarah Booker, was a chilling nightmare of girlhood and adolescence, full of body horror, pleasure, and pain, and went on to receive critical acclaim. In this follow-up, she brings her brand of intense psychological horror to the world of technology as the lives of six roommates revolve around a disturbing video game. (Coffee House, October 24)
And don’t miss The Devil of the Provinces by Juan Cárdenas, translated by Lizzie Davis. (Coffee House, September 12)
At Night He Lifts Weights: Stories by Kang Young-sook, translated by Janet Hong
Kang Young-sook is an award-winning author of many novels and short story collections and currently teaches creative writing at Korea National University of Arts. This short story collection is her first to be translated into English by none other than the brilliant Janet Hong. I’m a great admirer of Hong’s translations of the short stories of Ha Seong-Nan and numerous graphic novels by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, Yeong-Shin Ma, and Ancco, among others. Perceptive and subversive, the stories in At Night He Lifts Weights vary in tone and genre, but each is singularly captivating, swirling around themes of loss — ecological destruction, loneliness, and death. Each has a subtle illusion of calm that conceals what lies below in the unnerving depths. (Transit Books, November 14)
And don’t miss A Shining by the newly announced 2023 Nobel Prize Winner Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls. (Transit Books, October 31)
The Owl Cries by Hye-Young Pyun, Translated by Sore Kim-Russell
In this intense, psychological thriller, park ranger In-su Park decides to search for a missing man in the woods after a series of bizarre incidents, including discovering a mysterious note left on his desk that says, “The owl lives in the forest.” Just like in their Shirley Jackson Award–winning The Hole, Hye-Young Pyun and translator Sora Kim-Russell create a fast-paced and all-consuming story with an unusual narrator. In-su Park searches desperately for the missing man while also discovering more than he’d like in the forest, the people around him, and in himself. A novel of secrets, isolation, and pain, The Owl Cries is another tightly executed feat of writing. (Arcade, October 3)
Un Amor by Sara Mesa, translated by Katie Whittemore
I adored Sara Mesa’s sharply written and atmospheric novel of power, privilege, and violence, Four by Four — also translated by Katie Whittemore — and was interested to see this new novel explore many of the same themes. In Un Amor, a young woman arrives in a rural Spanish village to work on her first literary translation, but interactions with the locals quickly become complicated. There is a sustained tension in this atmospheric novel as Mesa explores language and power again but in a different, and maybe even more unsettling location than her last novel. It brings to mind the quiet horror of Marie NDiaye’s That Time of Year, translated by Jordan Stump, and so many other novels of the outsider. This bestselling novel has also just been turned into a film directed by Isabel Coixet. (Open Letter, November 21)
And don’t miss The Culture of Lies by Dubravka Ugresic, translated by Celia Hawkesworth. (Open Letter, September 26)
Elektrik: Caribbean Writing by Marie-Célie Agnant, Kettly Mars & Others, translated by Danielle Legros Georges, Lucy Scott & Others
I’ve loved the Calico series from Two Lines Press since its inception. The series presents vanguard works of translated literature in vibrant, strikingly designed editions. Each year, they publish two new titles in the Calico series, and each is as good, if not better than the last. Ranging from speculative Chinese fiction to Arabic poetry, Swahili fiction, and more, each book in the series is built around a theme and captures a thrilling and unique moment in international literature. “The Caribbean echoes like a lost world,” writes Mireille Jean-Gilles in Eric Fishman’s translation as she and the other women writers in Elektrik write poignantly about their identity and the Caribbean — the memories, pleasures, traumas, and “lightning visions” of their home. I was especially enamored with the visceral poetry of Haitian writer Marie-Célie Agnant included in the collection, translated in all of its strength and haunting beauty by Danielle Legros Georges. (Two Lines, September 26)
And don’t miss So Many People, Mariana by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. (Two Lines, October 10)
For more incredible new releases in translation from this year, check out this list of Hot Summer 2023 New Releases by Women in Translation.
As always, you can find a full list of new releases in the magical New Release Index, carefully curated by your favorite Book Riot editors, organized by genre and release date.
The Collins Dictionary word of the year is AI—the widely-used abbreviation for artificial intelligence.
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“Considered to be the next great technological revolution, AI has seen rapid development and has been much talked about in 2023,” the UK dictionary, published by HarperCollins in Glasgow, announced in a blog post today (Nov. 1).
AI has become increasingly embedded in daily lives, from everyday use cases like email that predicts what you’ll say next and Instagram’s beauty filters to bigger phenomenons like healthcare diagnosis and self-driving cars. The tech has even been used to generate fake songs and write closing arguments for lawyers. The advent and upward climb of ChatGPT, with impressive natural speech capabilities, as well as generative image software like DALL-E, blurred the lines between humans and robots.
AI in itself is a hotly debated term, defined as “the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs” by Collins, and it is often the subject of debate. On one hand, the tech reduces human error and speeds up functions, but on the other, it’s viewed as an ethically-ambigious, job-stealing, and data-compromising engine.
The result of all the hype, good and bad, was “an explosion of debate, scrutiny, and prediction,” as per Collins. Usage of the term has apparently quadrupled this year, the BBC reported, citing the publisher.
Just this week, US president Joe Biden issued AI guidelines and vice president Kamala Harris announced the US AI Safety Institute, which will create “guidelines, tools, benchmarks, and best practices” to help mitigate risks from AI, according to a fact sheet. The world’s first AI safety summit starts today (Nov. 1) in the UK, with major economies like India, the US, France, and Singapore in attendance.
Other contenders for Collins’ word of the year for 2023
De-influencing: When social media influencers “warn followers to avoid certain commercial products, lifestyle choices, etc.”
Nepo baby: The label applied to someone “whose career is believed to have been advanced by having famous parents.”
Semaglutide: The active ingredient in type 2 diabetes drug Ozempic and weight-loss drug Wegovy, both of which are made by Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, now one of the most valuable companies in Europe.
Canon event: Borrowed from literary studies, and a poke at the often too-restrictive demands of comic book fandomin this July’s hit film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (and, subsequently, a TikTok trend), the phrase has come to mean“an event that is essential to the formation of an individual’s character or identity,” as per Collins.
Ultra-processed: Foods “prepared using complex industrial methods, often using ingredients with little or no nutritional value.”
ULEZ: The acronym for “ultra-low emission zone,” where drivers incur a charge if they drive a polluting vehicle into the city. ULEZ expansion has been a political point of inflection this year.
Greedflation: When businesses use inflation as an excuse to hike prices to boost profit. Companies like PepsiCo and Nestle have been accused of it.
Debanking: Cutting people off from banking—a term largely in the news this year when populist UK politician Nigel Farage claimed his bank, Coutts, tried to close his account because of his political views.
Bazball: The “newly energetic (some say aggressive) form of the game named for England Test coach Brendon ‘Baz’ McCullum,” as defined by Collins.
Word of interest: NFT
AI is not the first tech abbreviation to be declared word of the year by Collins. In 2021, it was NFT (non-fungible tokens). That year, surrealist digital artist Beeple’sNFT of his piece Everydays: The First 5,000 Days—a collage of all the images he’d created since he committed in 2007 to making one every day—sold at Christie’s for a cool $69 million. He also sold another, Human One, for $28 million later that year.
Over the last year, though, these crypto assets appeared to have gone out of fashion., though experts say NFTs aren’t dead yet, just undergoing a market correction with prices cooling as challenges like authentication and preservation are solved.
One more thing: The Beatles are using AI to release their “last song”
Paul McCartney has used AI to help retrieve John Lennon’s vocals from an old demo cassette to create The Beatles’ “last song” Now and Then, which will be released tomorrow (Nov. 2). The track comes more than four decades after Lennon’s death (and nearly 30 years after their last last songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” were released, also from demo tapes of Lennon’s voice with new backing tracks).
“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear. It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording,” Paul McCartney said.
Australian cricketers have ridiculed the inclusion of the term “Bazball” in the Collins English Dictionary, as they prepare to meet England in the World Cup in Ahmedabad on Saturday.
Bazball is used to describe a style of play implemented by England Test coach and former New Zealand cricketer Brendon “Baz” McCullum, marked by a commitment to risk-taking and quick scoring.
The Collins Dictionary added Bazball to its publication this year and nominated it for word of the year, in a list that also included greedflation, deinfluencing and eventual winner AI.
Australian batter Marnus Labuschagne described the inclusion of Bazball in the dictionary as “garbage”. “Seriously I don’t know what that is, honestly,” he said.
His teammate Steve Smith also laughed when asked about it by reporters in India. “Guys just keep joking about it,” he said. “I think Ronnie [Australian coach Andrew McDonald] has had enough of hearing about Bazball to be honest.”
Australia retained the Ashes this year after the five-match series in England finished 2-2. In the year leading up to that series, McCullum’s England side won 10 of 12 Test matches and scored at 4.76 runs an over – more than one run per over more than any other Test side.
The term Bazball emerged during this period and became the catchcry of a fervent belief among England’s cricketers and fans that their play style was superior to others. Alongside captain Ben Stokes, McCullum even lectured county cricket on the approach and encouraged its adoption.
However, the term has not been universally embraced. McCullum himself described it as “silly” after it was coined in 2022.
“There’s actually quite a bit of thought that goes into how the guys manufacture their performances and when they put pressure on bowlers and which bowlers they put pressure on,” he told radio station SEN. “There’s also times when they’ve absorbed pressure beautifully as well.”
England’s one-day side, coached by Australian Matthew Mott, is bottom of the 10-team pool at the World Cup, having won just one of six matches.
Australia sit third, with games against Afghanistan and Bangladesh to follow this weekend’s England clash, as they look to secure a place in the semi-finals starting on 15 November.
