SmithWriting Blog

This week, the New Oxford American Dictionary announced its 2009 Word of the Year: “unfriend.”

Unfriend, a verb, means “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”

The choice points to the prevalence of social networking in our culture. In fact, a lot of the new words considered for Word of the Year grew out of our collective obsession with being connected to our networks.

For example, take “hashtag” (a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets), “intexticated” (distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle), and every tween’s parents’ nightmare, “sexting” (the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone).

Some considerations come from current issues in politics and the economy, such as “death panel” (a theoretical body that determines which patients deserve to live, when care is rationed) and “funemployed” (taking advantage of one’s newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests), while others, like “deleb” (a dead celebrity) and “tramp stamp” (a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman), tend toward the frivolous.

I wonder what’s in store for our vocabulary in 2010 …

Filed by rebecca at 9:09 pm under For the love of words
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