Pressing Olives

Periodically, a word I've heard all my life takes on a whole new meaning and becomes a buzzword. The word I am thinking of at the moment, is authentic. I use it in the old fashioned sense to describe today's picture…with apologies for the poor lighting. I decided to use the picture, despite its drawbacks, because it is "authentic". A young man on the back porch of a local, family run olive oil business, is putting olives through a small mechanical crusher to extract the oil, much of which is actually in the pits. The bins and bins full of olives around him will become "cold pressed, extra virgin olive oil" which will be sold, along with other products made from the oil and the wood of olive trees, in the shop in front.

I'm at a loss to fully grasp the more recent definition of "authentic", other than the fact that it seems to apply to individual people rather than a process, or an object. I assume a person is said to be "authentic' if they seem unassuming or unpretentious. I have recently heard it applied countless times to politicians (we just had an election but I will speak no further about that….) or to Hollywood types. These are two categories of people who, as a broad generalization, strike me as the most "inauthentic" people on the face of the earth, but perhaps I am missing the nuances of this new definition.

I am innately suspicious of overused or incorrectly applied words, but I suppose that makes me sound unbearably stuffy. Better that than authentic.