In political speeches, UN resolutions, social media posts or everyday speak, they were the terms in 2023 that everyone used – or should have used. Some were brand new, others old-new, but they all had a particular resonance this year.
The news year began with an old-new, as seasoned Brazilian statesman Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was sworn into office on January 1, 2023, for his third presidential term.
Older, grayer, but still fighting, Lula was back. Novelty had lost its sheen after a single Jair Bolsonaro term. The familiar brought comfort at the dawn of the new year.
But by the end of the year, a familiar issue re-emerged – and it was not comforting.
The October 7 Hamas attack put the Israeli-Palestinian issue back in the spotlight – and with it, came some old terms, applied with renewed urgency.
FRANCE 24 looks back at some of the terms that dominated the global discourse in 2023.
AI – Prompt
The race began at the end of 2022, when OpenAI suddenly released its ChatGPT, a mass-market gateway to generative AI. But it was in 2023 that the power of artificial intelligence was fully unleashed, with millions using it for a variety of functions as other tech giants – such as Google and Meta – raced to release their own AI products.
As competition advanced AI ever faster, public debate struggled to keep up. US President Joe Biden issued an executive order on AI safety standards in October. Barely two months later, EU member states reached a landmark AI regulation deal after intense negotiations. The deal still needs to be formally approved and applied by member states. It also has its critics, including governments and tech lobbying firms who worry Europe could lose out on the AI market.
Competition kick-started the AI race, and in 2023, the “prompt” – the human language that can be understood by AI platforms – hurtled it along.
Authentic
Merriam-Webster’s 2023 Word of the Year was chosen for the number of times the word was looked up, according to the US dictionary publishers. The “high volume lookup” was not just because it was used so often, but also because “authentic” has a number of meanings and is subject to debate.
In an AI age, the “real” or “genuine” became a fundamental counterpoint. “Authentic” is also associated with identity, which made it even more popular in a social media-driven world of self-expression, championed by celebrities. So, when Taylor Swift declared she was seeking her “authentic self”, it wasn’t long before millions got swept up in her quest for fulfilment.
Coup belt
Coups d’états returned to the Sahel and with it, the decline of French influence in its former African pré carré, or backyard, which saw Russia offer itself as a security partner of choice to putschists.
The Russian promise, in the guise of Wagner or Wagner 2.0 substitutes, is unlikely to deliver security and stability to a chronically impoverished, insecure, poorly administered part of the world.
But if the people of the Sahel found themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place, France was not able to win the day. French troop pullouts were largely welcomed in countries that never recovered from the brutality of colonialism nor the post-colonial Françafrique era of patronage networks.
France’s slow-boil of humiliation proved good for Russia and France’s loss in the coup belt spelt Russia’s gain.
Dollarisation and De-dollarisation
Both terms, antonyms, created a splash in 2023, reflecting opposing imperatives. De-dollarisation is an almost decade-old trend, reflecting growing dissatisfaction over the hegemony of the US dollar. The announcement this year of an additional six countries to the BRICS affiliation gave de-dollarisation a boost.
The BRICS group attempts to replace the US dollar with the “R5” – a reference to the five currencies used by the founding BRICS members: the Brazilian real, Russian ruble, Indian rupee, Chinese renminbi and South African rand. The addition of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to BRICS meant the de-dollarisation attempt looks set to continue.
But the old “dollarisation” also made a brief splash this year, when populist Argentinian presidential candidate Javier Milei promised to replace the battered peso with the greenback. On the campaign trail, a fake $100 bill featuring the wild-haired libertarian instead of a balding Benjamin Franklin became a familiar sight.
Milei won the election, but economists dismissed his self-styled “anarcho-capitalist” promise, which put the old de-dollarisation back on the ascendant.
Read moreWhy Javier Milei wants to dollarise Argentina’s economy
'Humanitarian pause', not 'ceasefire'
One of the year’s most bitter semantic debates had thousands of lives at stake.
As Israel launched retaliatory strikes on Gaza after the October 7 Hamas attack, the international community displayed unanimity in public calls for the protection of civilian life – then split on how to achieve it.
As Gazans perished in the thousands, a war of words raged at the UN Security Council. Heeding the call of aid organisations and UN bodies such as the World Health Organization, most countries in the 15-member body called for an “immediate ceasefire”.
But the term was a red line for the US, Israel’s primary backer and a veto-wielding permanent Security Council member. Pro-Israel US allies such as the UK and Germany this year followed the Biden administration’s position that a “ceasefire” implied a longer period, which could give Hamas the time to regroup.
“Humanitarian pause” then became the acceptable way to demand a halt to the fighting to enable a limited amount of aid to enter the blockaded Palestinian enclave.
Both terms lack legal definitions, making the language bickering a political row while Palestinians were killed, and the fate of the Israeli hostages kidnapped on October 7 took a backseat to their country’s war aims.
Fossil
Paleontologists this year uncovered several ground-breaking fossils – from the world's second-largest spider in Australia to a 41-million-year-old miniature whale in Egypt. But they were not the fossils on the table at the COP28 in Dubai, the commercial heart of the UAE, one of the world’s largest oil producers and home to seven so-called “carbon bombs”, the world’s biggest fossil fuel production projects.
In the end, the climate conference did manage to produce a compromise final deal. As with all compromises, the deal was spun differently by different stakeholders. Participants agreed to a “loss and damage fund” to support developing countries vulnerable to climate change. China and India, the world’s biggest current emitters, agreed to participate. But the fund, initially managed by the World Bank, is on a voluntary basis. The devil lies in the delivery.
And on the fossil fuel question, COP28 wound up with a pledge to “transition away” from fossil fuels. There was no mention of “phasing out” in the final text. It was a tiny step towards leaving fossil fuels buried in the ground to prevent climate change.
Global South
The Global South has replaced the Third World, less developed countries (ldcs) and developing countries as the term of choice despite geographic inconsistencies that see austral nations such as Australia and New Zealand in the Global North while the majority of Global South countries are in the northern hemisphere.
The year began with the West chastising the Global South for its neutrality on the first anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Global South’s failure to punish Russia for its breaches of international law and human rights abuses was viewed as an example of self-interest paralysing the post-war multilateral rules-based order.
Read moreUkraine war exposes splits between Global North and South
The Global South, for its part, accused the West of “double standards”. By the end of the year, as the Gaza humanitarian situation continued to deteriorate, the Global South led the charge against Israel’s breaches of international law and human rights abuses. But cut out from the power centre of permanent UN Security Council membership, the Global South position was blocked by the pro-Israel, US-led West.
The “double standards” accusation in the end won the day – and the year.
Read moreGlobal South slams West's 'double standards' as Israel-Hamas war rages
‘Quarante-neuf trois’ (49.3)
French President Emmanuel Macron’s move to increase the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 sparked a protest movement that dominated the discourse in France in 2023.
As opponents of the pension reform staged strikes and protests across French cities and towns, the government rammed the reform through parliament.
Enter “Quarante-neuf trois”, the street abbreviation for the controversial Article 49.3 of the French constitution, which grants the government executive privilege to pass a bill without a vote.
“Quarante-neuf trois” became the catch phrase for many of the challenges confronting French democracy – and the failure this year of the French quest to work less.
Rizz
Beating “Swiftie”, “situationship” and “de-influencing”, “rizz” claimed Oxford English Dictionary’s 2023 word of the year.
For those who never knew the word before, it was a sign they weren’t keeping up with the times.
"Rizz is a colloquial word, defined as style, charm, or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner," according to the Oxford University Press.
The term is thought to be a shortened form of the word "charisma". It can also be used as a verb. So, "to rizz up" means to attract, seduce, or chat someone up.
For a generation of youth emerging from the isolation of the Covid pandemic, the “rizz” rise up the slang ranks marked a return to the world of socialising, face-to-face dating and the social grading of the real world that we all missed.
X
Twitter died in 2023. Well, not quite. The social media transformed – some would say “transmogrified” – into X.
It was a symbolic statement of the takeover of Elon Musk of things once relegated to state control, from policing (or the lack of policing) speech to space, which enabled the whimsical, South African-born magnate to dictate whether civilians in war zones from Ukraine to Gaza had Internet connectivity.
The old Twitter lost its famous blue bird. The old-new Twitter sported a terrifying, black X instead. The first fallout: X lost more than 5% of its daily active users in August and September. Add to this the massive presence of fake news, shadowbanning and the loss of brand value and advertisers – notably IBM and the European Commission – and it made for a rather chaotic year for X.
