‘Unfriend’ - New Oxford American Word of the Year
Trend and technology had taken a complete twirl of our lives - and even affect the most basic of us. As I was reading news on the Net lately, I came across the following interesting technology news item. For more tech-savvy updates, click here.
‘UNFRIEND’ - New Oxford American Word of the Year
On November 16, the New Oxford American Dictionary had named ‘unfriend’ as its new Word of the Year. It’s meaning is how you’ll expect it to be - "To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook". With the evident influence of technology, even the dictionary makers are very much into creating buzz in social mediaby using tech-savvy terms. Other words considered were hashtag, sexting, freemium, paywall,netbook and et cetera.
Christen Lindberg, a senior lexicographer for Oxford US Dictionary Program, says the term ‘unfriend‘ is easily adoptable as a modern verb form since in social networking, it’s meaning is easily understood. This makes the word interesting enough to be chosen as the 2009 Word of the Year.
Twitter, and Facebook had also received such treatment in Collins English Dictionary. Meriam Webster’s Dictionary had also topped the word ‘Blog’ way back 2004.
Facebook Status frees Robbery Suspect
Charges to a 19-year old robbery suspect in New York was dismissed. He was arrested for 12 days after being suspected responsible of the October 17 robbery of two people in Brooklyn.
He insisted he was not in Brooklyn at the time of the crime and then claimed he was in his father’s house in Manhattan. He used as an evidence the Facebook status update he posted using a computer in his father’s building.
He was then dismissed of the charges.
