Word of the Year?

Post-pal is better than unfriend, but the thought it conjures up for me is mail-friend. If we were able to organise our friends list, this wouldn't be such a problem. The friends we communicate with most would be on page one (and on our profile page). The ones we communicate with sometimes, would be on page two etc.

Being able to organise our friends list like that would be terrific. Might make people do to many pointless responses just to get to that front page thought.

I agree with you a bit. 'Deleting a friend' sounds like verbal murder, and I don't like that. 'Unfriend', while better is still not quite right to me. When you untie a knot, it's like the knot never existed. I think we need a new word that acknowledges the former friendship even though the status has changed. Something like 'wasafriend'...lol.

1rsavage, how do you say "I have my own agenda and intend to push it" in French? Lash

english sucks and is very hard to learn. french is where its at@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

If French is where it is at, please explain to me in logical terminology why in French, inanimate objects such as tables and chairs, have gender, when in reality they are inanimate objects. The answer is, there is no answer and that is just the way it is, so if you don't like it, suck a lemon. I know English has a pile of Lemons attached to it, but for me English is the more familiar and able method, for you it is French. They are both a bit silly.

With so many words incorporated into our language to describle some things, it is a bit surprising that there are not more words defining the varying degrees of friendship, isn't it? Look at how many words can define, say, blue or purple. I can easily see, with more global communications, that more words will be either adopted from other languages, or new ones will be devised. One would hope for a little more creativity than 'unfriend'.

i think so many people are now friends on social networks there is need to define the word friendship and the good dictionary has tried.

Just goes to show that what's new is old, and what's old is new. Hmmmm...I wonder if that includes us?

Hi mpkool! Welcome to myLot, I hope you enjoy your time here and meet a lot of new friends who will never become 'unfriends'.. Postpone means to reschedule an engagement to a later time, so it makes sense to have a word for when you change the engagement to an earlier time. I bet there are a lot of students world-wide who would not like it too much if instructors got into the habit of preponing homework assignments! What you might find interesting is that the word PONE, which postpone and prepone are based on, is basically a word for corn bread. Makes one wonder how these words came into being, doesn't it?

thanx for such a warm welcome. yeah no one here will 'befriend' but only after I 'friend' them..lolz..so sending a request to you. yup we can only wonder how these words come from..It's such a fantastic one.

What a well thoughtout and informative answer! For the flammable/inflammable definitions, do you know if the prefix IN was once interchangeable with the prefix UN? The development and later changes of the Roman calendar is also a great example of how something that is generally accepted as absolute can change. The Romans originally borrowed the calendar concept from the Greeks, but it was only 10 months, or 304 days long. They went through centuries of adding and subtracting days so that summer more or less fell in summer and winter fell in winter. It was Julius Ceasar who devised the Julian calender, with 12 months, so that it followed a solar calendar. Can you imagine the shock to the populous to undergo a change like that? Original month names were probably kept to soften the blow. You'd think that sometime in the last 2,000 some one could have changed it. Unfortunately, since it is accepted globally, any new names would probably have to be agreed upon globally too. There's probably a better chance of us myLotters accomplishing that, than the governments of all the worlds countries. But who listens to us?

You are absolutely right Hatley. Between words that are spelled the same, but with different meanings depending on context (as you pointed out)...and words that sound the same but have different meanings and usages (to, too and two -or- bear and bare), I would be confused all the time if I was learning English. Then we have idioms which if taken literally must be extremely confusing, "I've got my eye on that chair". I cetainly wouldn't want to picture that literal meaning...lol.

Re-add sounds like it should mean that some one is double-checking their arithmetic, doesn't it? Sometimes it seems that individual words are strung together to made building blocks for new words. With the latest 'teen' trend of seeing the word 'not' attached to a word to render an opposite meaning, I hope never to see that as an acceptable suffix.

Hi grandpa_lash! Haven't seen you in a long time, hope all is well. I'm with you on your thoughts concerning 'unfriend' used as a noun. 'Unfriend' may get the job done in a genteel fashion, but it's a lot more satisfying to refer to them as "uncomplimentary parts of the appropriately gendered body", although personally I tend to mix in some some references to animal species too. As a verb it is still an awkward-sounding word. I'd like to see a little more imagination in coming up with a word that expresses the same meaning.

It is funny. I never heard it until I read the news article yesterday. Some acronyms are more universally known and accepted (LOL, LMAO, BTW, etc.) than 'unfriend' but most of them aren't in the dictionary....yet.