Listening to linguist Geoff Nunberg reflect on the language of the last decade made me realize how reviving technology has been for language (not the opposite as stodgy critics might suggest). We have seen so many words and phrases evolve based on social media and technology (retweet, "friend" and "Google" as a verb, "status" as something other than your place in life, etc.). The geek writing this was overjoyed to hear that the AP Stylebook (the journalist's bible) is adding a section about social media.
Yes, so, I'm all for evolving language, but I like to add rules to it as we go. Consistency breeds clarity.
This brings me to one of my favorite social media stories of this year, about a debate over social media phraseology (originally published November 17 on Examiner.com):
It seems the general public lacks a consensus about the proper way to refer to expunging a digital friend, but academia has spoken.
The Oxford American Dictionary made big news this week when it announced "unfriend" as its word of the year. "Unfriend" gained notoriety as a word to refer to deleting someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook.
But wait just one minute. Many Facebook fans were quick to say "isn't the word 'defriend?'" — as in "I can't believe Brad defriended me when we broke up" rather than "I can't believe Brad unfriended me when we broke up."
Even Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes admitted he would have gone with "defriend."
“I was surprised that that was the word that they’ve chosen,” Hughes told The Post-Standard in Syracuse, New York, before speaking to a community college.
While Oxford tried to incorporate the evolving technological lexicon, it looks like it might be difficult to find uniformity. So, is it defriend or unfriend? ... Or unimportant?
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