Get your word's worth

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In the beginning was the Word. Then the species became needlessly talkative and new words had to be invented and added to the lexicon. This went on happening for thousands of years until one day it seemed that the process was set to reverse itself, with Internet chat-sites and SMS jargon encouraging the abbreviation of existing words into near-unrecognisable forms (“gr8 2 c u!”). Surely dictionaries will become passé now, we thought.

We were wrong. They’re getting even fatter instead, because our primeval hunger for collecting trinkets — no matter how useless they might be — persists. The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its word of the year for 2009, and the word this time is “Unfriend”, which expresses an action that millions of Netizens around the world regularly engage in. As the Oxford blog (http://tinyurl.com/yzflj6s) tells us, it means “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.” (For an idea of why someone would do this, Google “Reasons why Twitter and Facebook Folk Unfriend You”.)

Most reactions to “unfriend” haven’t been positive, but at least it’s better — only just — than some of the other words that made it to the shortlist. Like “intexticated”, which means “driving while texting”. Or “deleb” (“a dead celebrity”). Or “sexting”. (You really want to know? Okay. “The sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone.”) Looking at the list, the main standard for a Word of the Year seems to be that on no account must it roll smoothly off your tongue.

But there are other objections to “unfriend”. Some pedantic Facebookers are pointing out that the expression they’ve been using all this while is “defriend” (though others respond that “Unfriend sounds like a natural English coinage to me — if Shakespeare was happy to use ‘unsex’, what’s the problem?”). “Was the selection made by the same moron who decided that ‘Undo’ should be a computer command?” complains a commenter on Metafilter (http://tinyurl.com/y86of3j). “How double plus un-good!” Someone else observes unhappily that “There is no longer a noun that cannot be verbed.”

Richard MacManus, the founder of the ReadWriteWeb site (http://tinyurl.com/yj6e6l9), considers “unfriend” an odd choice for WOTY, because “all the trends indicate there has been more social networking activity this past year — not less, as ‘unfriend’ implies. Facebook and Twitter have both rocketed in popularity in 2009.”

“I also think,” he sniffs, “that it’s an ugly word to begin with.” However, comments on Mashable: The Social Media Guide (http://tinyurl.com/y8fluan) suggest that the word might evolve and develop a more nuanced meaning over the years: “It could be like a lesser form of frenemy, e.g. ‘oh yeah he’s not that cool but he’s my unfriend because his girlfriend might hook me up with a job’.”

In a thoughtful article at Crunch Gear (http://tinyurl.com/yz55qwl), Devin Coldewey examines words of the year over the past decade as markers of changing technology and how it’s affected our lives. (Can you remember a time when the expression “to Google something” — the WOTY in 1998 — wasn’t around?) But as blogger Usha Vaidyanathan points out (http://tinyurl.com/yawtc7h) points out, the concept described here is hardly a new one; a version of “unfriending” has been around in India for a very long time. “The Tamil word for it is ‘Kaa’. Children unfriend each other by simply telling them ‘I am Kaa with you’. I think Hindi-speaking children use ‘katti’ for this. It is the children’s version of imposing sanctions — they won’t speak to you and you cannot play with them. For me and my friends there was no fate worse... It was the end of the world.” Perhaps Indian Netizens should start an online petition to have “katti” included as a source word.

(jaiarjun@gmail.com)