Oh Hey There

unfriend vs defriend follow-up

alexwhines sent me an article by the linguist Ben Zimmer on the prefix un- and its prevalence in recent years:

The recent un- trend has also seeped into the world of advertising. KFC is marketing its new Kentucky Grilled Chicken with the tagline “UNthink: Taste the UNfried Side of KFC.” The cellphone company MetroPCS challenges you to “Unlimit Yourself,” while its competitor Boost Mobile wants you to get “UNoverage’D” and “UNcontract’D” (ridding yourself of burdensome overage fees and contracts). Even victims of the financial downturn can seek solace in un-: ABC broadcast a special report in May telling viewers how to get “Un-Broke.”

Zimmer claims that decades of undo commands have fostered “expectations that any action can be taken back”. This is a kind of cultural shift, and he cites uses of the reversal un- in literature and song where undoing is impossible:

Jane Eyre: “I had learned to love Mr. Rochester; I could not unlove him now.”
Macbeth: “What’s done cannot be undone.”
Lucinda Williams: “Unsuffer Me”
Toni Braxton: “Un-Break My Heart”
Lynn Anderson: “How Can I Unlove You?”

In these literary uses, indeed, what’s done cannot be undone, so the prefix expresses that some state of affairs cannot be reversed. However, the creative uses of the reversal un- prefix make the opposite point: You can unlimit yourself, you can become unbroke.

It would be inappropriate, I think, to take seriously the idea that the information age has changed our understanding of how the world works, that CTRL+Z has conditioned us to consider any action undoable. Instead, the novel uses of reversal un- reflect the prominence of electronic media in our lives. Zimmer concludes:

What sets latter-day un- verbs apart from these historical examples is that the “reality rewind” is no longer a flight of counterfactual fancy: it’s built right into the interfaces that we use to make sense of our shared virtual worlds.

Facebook, for instance, allows you to register approval for a posted message in a very concrete way, by clicking a thumbs-up like button. Toggling off the button results in unliking your previously liked item. Note that this is different from disliking something, since unliking simply returns you to a neutral state. This kind of instant reversibility is now an inescapable facet of our digitized life — like it or un-.

This “neutral state” seems significant to me. cureforbedbugs says that defriending is a permanent clean-up kind of action like decluttering or debugging. This fact clues into the IRL consequences and hurt feelings that come from severing a relation in a social network. But as far as the software is concerned, friending is just a relation between two objects, so there is always a neutral state and users can arbitrarily unfriend and refriend each other. So I wonder how the speakers who prefer “defriend” think of the predicate: in terms of software or people? permanent action or reversible setting? Or maybe they haven’t thought about it. I suspect the latter—I’m not inclined to Sapir-Whorfian generalizations.

Posted November 17, 2009 at 12:50pm | Comments || home