A friend's just a stranger you haven't unmet (20091116)
The blog of the Oxford University Press announced yesterday that the New Oxford American Dictionary 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.
unfriend — verb — To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.
In the post, Christine Lindberg writes that It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!)
. Although befriend and antonym unbefriend are available, e.g.,
...hazard may also favor as well as disfavor, and will not unbefriend the enterprising any more than the timid.
from The Century magazine, Nov. 1884.
This definition raises more questions than it answers.
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For instance, is there a noun form? What is an unfriend? Who are they? When unfriending someone, do they stop being a friend and start being an unfriend? Is there a division between the friends, the unfriends, and everyone else?
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Typically a social networking site has a closed-world model. Both transitions A and B are to remove someone from the collection of friends on the site, yet the apparent (to the site) unfriending in A results in the person still being a friend, just not a ‘friend’ on the site.
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Does a site acknowledge its boundaries? Does a community? What happens to those who leave? Is leaving 'willingly' and being 'unfriended out' the same?
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Source: The Commissar Vanishes
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Copyright 1999-2011 Mark Wahl. All rights reserved.