Karen Bleier/AFP via GettyIt’s been a year of artifice, of AI-generated deepfakes, blue-tick trolls, and post-truth politicking. Which makes Merriam-Webster’s 2023 word of the year all the more surprising: “authentic.” The dictionary people make their choice from among the words that have been the most searched-for over the past 12 months, and “authentic” was consistently high-ranking—helped no doubt by the range of meanings attached to it. Nobody is quite sure why it’s done so well, but M-W edi