Monday the New Oxford American Dictionary named “unfriend” 2009’s word of the year.
unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.
As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”
“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”
We’ve looked at the word “unfriend” before, and it’s not a wholly inappropriate choice. I do, however, imagine it’ll be somewhat disheartening to reflect on 2009 as the year that friendship lost its currency. Although, perhaps that’ll be better than always remembering it as the year that the dollar lost its currency.
Here are some of the runners-up. I took the liberty of coloring gray the ones I thought were stupid choices, because they’re idiotic, unremarkable or little-used in the vernacular, or, as in the cases of Ardi and death panel, a beneficiary of the recency effect.
It was after midnight on a recent Friday in midtown. Blinding white lights and the crackle of walkie talkied banter heralded another of the thousands of film and photo shoots that take place around the city. Four lithe female figures stood backlit on an empty stretch of Manhattan’s tony 5th Avenue. Sex and the City promos, perhaps. Maybe some Gossip Girl shenanigans. Oh, if only.
The spots were quirky, cheeky nods at fashion and celebrity culture, campy send-ups in a pop-art pastiche. Donovan, a former fashion editor, though not a household name by a long shot, portrayed the fashionista-tastemaker archetype with such perfection — a seemingly impossible blend between subtle and over the top — that she became an immediately recognizable icon even to those to whom her trademark oversize black-rimmed glasses were a novelty.
In case you felt people weren’t paying quite enough attention to your weight-loss efforts, now you can auto-Tweet the progress you’re making on those jelly rolls and muffin tops. Withings, maker of a sleek iPhone-adapted body mass indexing scale have now built Twitter functionality right into their app. From a press release yesterday:
No Happy Medium 