I do love announcements of new words, especially when they cause a debate.<\/p>\n
The New Oxford American Dictionary<\/a> has pronounced \u2018unfriend\u2019<\/a> its 2009 Word of the Year. All well and good… except I, along with many others, thought the term was \u2018defriend\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n The official definition: unfriend \u2013 verb \u2013 To remove someone as a \u2018friend\u2019 on a social networking site such as Facebook.<\/em><\/p>\n Whilst I agree with the definition, I prefer \u2018defriend\u2019 \u2013 it rolls off the tongue better, don\u2019t you think? And it sounds nicer \u2013 unfriend is short for unfriendly after all.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not alone<\/a> in preferring \u2018defriend\u2019 \u2013 New York Magazine<\/a> agrees with me, and even went so far as to ask Facebook which term they prefer (they don\u2019t mind).<\/p>\n Do you prefer to unfriend<\/strong> or defriend<\/strong>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I do love announcements of new words, especially when they cause a debate. The New Oxford American Dictionary has pronounced \u2018unfriend\u2019 its 2009 Word of the Year. All well and good… except I, along with many others, thought the term was \u2018defriend\u2019. The official definition: unfriend \u2013 verb \u2013 To remove someone as a \u2018friend\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,35,44],"tags":[402,400,398,403,399,401,44],"class_list":["post-493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-events","category-words","tag-definition","tag-defriend","tag-new-oxford-american-dictionary","tag-social-networking","tag-unfriend","tag-word-of-the-year","tag-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":496,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions\/496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}