Oxford Dictionaries = Expensive Toilet Paper - November 18th, 2009

In case that sounds a bit harsh, it’s because it is, but after reading yesterday’s release from the Oxford University Press, it’s warranted. The release announced Oxford’s coveted Word of the Year to be none other than the now ubiquitous Unfriend, which in and of itself is no matter of contention.

The problem is how they’ve gone and incorporated the word into their once-respectable tomes. They couldn’t simply acknowledge the word for being pervasive and relevant to the times — they had to pander and show how horrid social ineptitude can get in an office full of lexicographers and linguists.

Here’s what the OUP had to say about this joyous event:

Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

Did you notice it? Facebook was expressly mentioned not once, but twice. This may not seem so important if you don’t follow the importance of dictionaries, and their historical value, but it is. A dictionary, like Oxford, is inherently sacred in that it acts as a vehicle for our very language. Soiling its pages with proper names of companies that will likely no longer exist in 20 years time is simply irresponsible and disrespects the lexicon.

The definition provided is entirely sufficient without the added “such as Facebook” clause. Including it was wrong. Using it again in the example is gratuitously wrong, and to really make things sad and pathetic, they even link back to Facebook whenever they use the word.

But that’s not all they managed to screw up in this hapless festival of failed tech-hipstering — in showing off their other bleeding edge words of tech, they showed that they not only have no idea what a netbook is, but also that they’ve never used Twitter, or read a history book.

According to these geniuses, netbooks are differentiated from laptops only by their “limited memory,” and the definition for hashtags is so absurdly lengthy that it’s obviously written by a person who learns all they know of Twitter from CNN. They also made a point of reinventing the word Teabagger, and not in the perverted way that one might expect; they pandered to the sickening displays of ignorance and pygmy-mindedness that are new America’s Tea Parties — “in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773.” Apparently the fact that the original teabaggers earned their name 200 years ago isn’t important when it’s so damn trendy these days to be a bigot and idiot.