I can hear William Shakespeare rolling in his grave like a lamb on the spit in a late-night kebab shop. Some genius at New Oxford American Dictionary has decided that ‘unfriend’—the act of removing someone’s friendship on a social networking site such as Facebook—is worthy of being officially adopted into official American English after its proliferation in the public vernacular in recent years.
‘Unfriend’ usurped equally as transient words to receive the dishonour, including ‘netbook’, ‘sexting’, ‘birther’, ‘paywall’ and ‘death panel’; all of which sound like they were concocted by monkeys eavesdropping on a Human Resources meeting. Sure, it’s not overly offensive, but once you open the floodgates the uneducated and inarticulate will be wiping their genitalia over the reference section in local libraries … so to speak. Now how do they suppose we get that stench out of all thirty-two volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica?
(Source: Yahoo! Canada News)
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Published on 23 November 2009 by Agony Uncle