Friend, Unfriend, Defriend
to friend: verbo transitivo
to unfriend o to defriend: verbo transitivo
Is there a type of Facebook user you think people should avoid friending?
A few weeks ago, I re-friended a woman on Facebook.
We know from multiple studies that the number one reason for friending a brand is to receive special deals and promotions.
If you choose to unfriend someone, you’ll be removed from that person’s friends list as well.
Ever been unable to access a “friend’s” profile page on Facebook? It’s likely that they defriended you without you knowing.
Tanto tempo fa, prima che i social media entrassero di prepotenza nelle nostre vite, la parola friend indicava una persona a cui si è legati da vincoli d’amicizia. Poi arrivò Facebook e il sostantivo friend acquistò anche il significato di ‘persona a cui si è connessi attraverso un social network’; inoltre, si sviluppò un uso verbale del termine, to friend someone. Purtroppo a volte, si sa, ci si stufa di qualcuno… No problem, escludi gli indesiderati dalla tua vita online! Su Facebook c’è una funzione comodissima che ti permette di unfriend qualcuno in un batter d’occhio, o meglio, in un solo clic.
Ma qual è la forma preferita, unfriend o defriend? Nonostante defriend sia stata la ‘parola dell’anno 2009’ per l’Oxford Dictionary, su Facebook si usa unfriend, termine che tra l’altro dà il quadruplo di risultati su Google rispetto a defriend.
Origini del termine
In inglese, uno dei modi più comuni per creare nuovi significati è di partire da una parola esistente e cambiarne la funzione grammaticale. La trasformazione detta verbing si ha quando un sostantivo (oppure un’altra parte del discorso) diventa verbo, proprio come è successo a friend. Un- e de- sono classici prefissi della formazione dei contrari, per cui abbiamo unfriend e defriend. A proposito, forse vi sorprenderà sapere che il verbo unfriend ha qualche annetto sulle spalle in più di Facebook: fu usato dallo scrittore inglese Thomas Fuller nel XVII secolo.
to friend: verb
to unfriend or to defriend: verb
Is there a type of Facebook user you think people should avoid friending?
A few weeks ago, I re-friended a woman on Facebook.
We know from multiple studies that the number one reason for friending a brand is to receive special deals and promotions.
If you choose to unfriend someone, you’ll be removed from that person’s friends list as well.
Ever been unable to access a “friend’s” profile page on Facebook? It’s likely that they defriended you without you knowing.
Back in the dim and distant past before social media were a thing, a friend was someone you knew and liked who wasn’t related to you. Then came Facebook and the noun friend acquired an additional meaning, of someone you were connected to on a social network, and a verbal use meaning to connect with someone in this way. Of course sometimes you get tired of them, just as you do with your real friends, but in this case you can just exclude them from your online life, since Facebook helpfully provides a button allowing you to unfriend them as quickly and easily as you friended them in the first place.
So which is the preferred form, unfriend or defriend? While defriend was Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year in 2009, Facebook itself uses unfriend, which is about 4 times as common as defriend on Google. A very large corpus of current English gives a similar result.
Origin
Verbing, as the process of words from different word classes becoming verbs is called, is as old as the English language and is a common and useful way for new words to be added to the store of vocabulary. So it is no surprise that the noun friend should give birth to a related verb. Un- and de- are the two most common ways of turning a word into its opposite. Surprisingly, perhaps, the verb unfriend predates social media by several centuries, having first been used by the English writer Thomas Fuller back in the 17th century.
