Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year: Unfriend

Oxford Dictionary has announced that the word of the year is Unfriend. What to do with this? Unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. I’m not sure what to do with this.

To give some perspective, last year’s word of the year was Hypermile. “Hypermiling” was coined in 2004 by Wayne Gerdes, who runs a gas saving website. “Hypermiling” or “to hypermile” is to attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques. Rather than aiming for good mileage or even great mileage, hypermilers seek to push their gas tanks to the limit and achieve hypermileage, exceeding EPA ratings for miles per gallon.

Back to unfriend. We are a country that loves to make things disappear. The homeless in New York City are gathered up sometimes and sent to a farm upstate. As long as they stay hidden from public view, they are fine, but the minute they show up in public, they are removed. We take away through plastic surgery anything that just doesn’t look quite right. I actually know someone who had the scars of riding boot rubs removed from her daughter’s legs at the age of 10 because she didn’t like the way it looked. I still have the scar on my toe where I stepped on glass on Cape Cod walking barefoot into town to play miniature golf. And now, according to the stately Oxford Dictionary, we can now take away that which we have previously called a friend by a sweep of the keystroke on our computer.

I have unfriended people on Facebook. You can do it without the person knowing. The software doesn’t alert them that they have been unfriended. One person, who was constantly complaining day after day on Facebook who I unfriended just to get some relief, actually emailed me and asked me what happened? I, being the strong speak-my-own-truth person that I am, said, “Gosh, I have no idea. Must have been a mistake,” and reinstated her. I have no backbone.

I used to call a handful of people friend. Really, if you asked me how many friends I had, I would have rattled off my college friends and a few lasting friends over my adult years. Maybe ten at the top. Now, if you ask Facebook how many friends I have, you will see that I have hundreds. Literally hundreds of friends.

I’m thinking that maybe ‘unfriend’ shouldn’t be a word at all, but rather ‘friend’ should go back to being a word with a larger meaning. We have bastardized the word friend, creating the need for the word unfriend to accommodate that which having friends who aren’t really friends at all has created. That was a mouthful but you get the point. It’s really about us diluting too many things in our life. We dilute through excess and friends on Facebook is a good example. If my Facebook really was only filled with friends, I would give more information on my page. I would tell things as they were really happening. It could be amazing. I would be listed as having 10 friends and be able to keep in touch with them in a way that would be much stronger than it is now.

I think they should change the word on Facebook from ‘friends’ to ‘faces’ instead. Or, change the number of friends we have to reflect accurately our friends list. Thanks Oxford for helping me see why I don’t much like Facebook.