Like Everything Else, the Word of the Year is All About Rejection
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009
Just as we were still getting used to not! and khalid sheik mohammed, the Oscars for words apparently took place over the weekend and chose a new Best Picture: unfriend. Explains the judges, the Oxford English Dictionary, “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook” (which was itself WOTY in 2007). Meanwhile, the Olde English Dictionary went with the more standard term, Whopper Sacrifice.
“Unfriend” was apparently chosen for being slightly less terrible than other words, like hashtag, sexting, freemium, paywall, funemployed, zombie bank, a crap load of words related to twitter that we won’t mention here, birther, death panel and teabagger. That last one is actually an old word, but please don’t tell the New York Times.
Gosh, if this Oxford English Dictionary gets any bigger, we’re going to need to get a CD-ROM version. Though, hmmmmm. That would also mean we’d need to finally buy one of these computer things.
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Alex_Pasternack
my other card is a hard drive
New York, United States
Member since 2009
An enthusiast of science, technology and web surfing, Alex Pasternack has written about culture, politics and the built and natural environments in places as far afield as Sichuan, China, Ulan Ude,...
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waste 3 months ago
There is something tedious about this award every year. Maybe I have a problem with the spirit of the competition.
BKallday 3 months ago
that second paragraph is possibly the best two sentences ever written.
Mason 3 months ago
I unfriend someone and they have been defriended... works for me, a 2fer1
_SOS_ 3 months ago
And all this time I've been saying "defriended."
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