Pastor Mike Nodland of the Christian Fellowship Church in Vining, IA.

There are a rising number of words that just don’t make sense at all. It makes me feel like I’m losing connection with my own culture. I’ve struggled understanding what AI means…short for “artificial intelligence.” Maybe I’m not intelligent enough.

15 new words have been added to the English language for 2024! “Buzzed” doesn’t mean that a mosquito or wasp is after you, nor does it mean “slightly adrift or inebriated,” but now it means that I’m “excited,” like “I was ‘buzzed’ that I won twelfth place at Colorado’s Burro Days Race!” I didn’t, so I must be “unbuzzed.”

One newer expression stupefies me: “free range!” It doesn’t mean free range! Instead, it means that the chicken had access to outdoors more than 51% of its life. “Free range” is actually a marketing gimmick to make us feel good about eating a “healthy,” chemically enriched drumstick! Why no bird confinement? Well, you’re not going to like this answer: to prevent cannibalism. Gulp?

But what about the new word, “deepfake?” AI, for example, has the capability of producing a fake picture, digitally manipulated to fool us into thinking that an image is real! Hence, “deepfake!” My advice: unplug deepfake and grab the real. Jesus is real, and the rest is for the birds!