Fwd: My vote for word of the year: unfriend

D Harris cats22 at STNY.RR.COM
Thu Sep 25 02:11:58 UTC 2008


One can befriend someone.One can, one way or another, get friends. Some occasionally forget a friend. One cannot, however, beget friends.
dh


---- Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
> At 6:15 AM -0700 9/24/08, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> >a WOTY suggestion.
> >
> >Begin forwarded message:
> >
> >>From: Stewart Haddock <SHaddock at web.com>
> >>Date: September 23, 2008 8:18:35 AM PDT
> >>To: "zwicky at csli.stanford.edu" <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
> >>Subject: My vote for word of the year:  unfriend
> >>
> >>Hello,
> >>
> >>I just read your post about the LOL cats on Karen Baumer's Facebook
> >>page and it got me thinking about the word 'unfriend'.   I do not
> >>know how one chooses the word of the year, but 'unfriend' is one
> >>that I have used a lot this year and I never seemed to use before.
> >>
> >>Stewart
> >
> >------------------------------------------------------------
> >The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> I see two problems.  One is that "defriend" is even more established
> in the same use, more specifically 'remove from one's LiveJournal
> friends list' or more generally as an antonym of "befriend" (see the
> first few entries on google's collection of 24,900 hits, or the entry
> in the Unwords Dictionary (http://www.unwords.com/, slogan "Changing
> the English Language One Word At a Time").  The second is that
> there's also a noun "unfriend" (sort of like an enemy, but maybe not
> a sworn one).
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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