It's all over the press, unfriend, as you may have heard, is the Oxford Dictionary's WOTY (Word of the Year). Definition is as follows:

Unfriend: To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Other techy words like paywall and freemium were considered but were, unfriended from the list after further deliberation.

My question to pose is, who comes up with these words? They must have a lot of time on their hands. To me, the word unfriend is like "sexting", "freakonomics" and dare I say, "Brangelina" all of which are, at first slightly creative, but mostly just egregious and oversimplified juxtapositions to the English language, not to mention in this blogger's opinion, overused. Nevertheless, the language goes where the people take it, so it is quite possible that we can expect more social media and pop culture jargon in our lives and in the work place.

Unfriend is not a bad word, per-se, the idea of social media jargon is a wonderful thought. The fact that they chose social media jargon as the one and only Word of the Year shows just how powerful the device is becoming in our society. Social media, at some point in the last 10 years was nonexistent and now look at it, even my parents (commonly known as technologically inept (sorry!)) are using it. Use this news quip as an example for your webventures, don't unfriend social media because it seems too frivolous or casual, instead update your status as a website by making it interesting, dynamic, and accessible to all kinds of people.

<JE

Post Away: Have any web technology words (or words you made up) you think should make our list of Vipa word of the year? Post away below!