Apparently, the New Oxford American Dictionary has a Word of the Year thing every year. And this year's word is "unfriend".
There are so many things that are wrong with "unfriend" then I don't even know where to start.
The first thing that floated to my mind when I heard this word was my primary school days. It was exactly one of those words that we would use back then when we were angry with our friends. I can imagine it fitting perfectly into a primary school girl's sentence, "You are so bad! I'm going to unfriend you! Hrumph!"
Ok, that's childish banter and kids nowadays probably don't speak like that anymore but still! It doesn't make sense in any way. How do you un-friend someone? I know that this word was inspired from the networking world that we are living in, a.k.a. Facebook, Twitter etc..., but in the real world, where there are real people, unfriend do not make any sense at all. You can decide to click on a button to unfriend someone on Facebook or unfollow (omg, probably next year's Word of the Year will be "unfollow"!!) people in Twitter but it is not possible in the real world.
Even if it is slightly more applicable in the virtual world, this unfriend business will probably only last for a while. The example given in the website: “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”
That status of unfriend-ness is probably only temporary because after all had cooled down from the fight, they will refriend each other! Omg, probably "refriend" will be a good contender for "unfollow" too! What a tough fight! Digressing quite a bit here as this whole thing sounds absurd to me.
It basically implies that you can undo this action of friending a person and voila, it will be as if this person had never been your friend before!
I rest my case. I should go onto my Facebook and start unfriending people now. Or probably I have already been unfriended by others.
