The New Oxford Dictionary has named “unfriend” as the 2009 Word of the Year.
Unfriend (v.) The act of “remov[ing] someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”
An unlovely word, unfriend (wouldn’t “defriend” be more accurate?) beat out other tech terms for Word of the Year, including sexting, hashtag, and intexticated–defined as driving while distracted by texting. Other runners-up: funemployed, teabagger and death panel.
Purists and pedants may blanch, but next time a student uses the word in an essay and claims, “It’s in the dictionary!” you will have to cede the point. As one of my former English teachers used to say, “A dictionary is not a rule book, it’s a history book.”
These are also the morons who chose “podcast” as their word of the year in 2006, but couldn’t even get the definition right. They neglected to include the requirement for an RSS feed for automatic download, which is what separates a true podcast from a simple downloadable file. This is sort of incompetence does not bode well for their trustworthiness as a source.
Comment by Obi-Wandreas — November 17, 2009 @ 10:33 am