The “new language of Facebook”.

The ticker is why I’m leaving Facebook.

donkeyhotay - 30 September 2011 11:36 AM

The ticker is why I’m leaving Facebook.

I’ve heard this from people and I’ve always found it baffling since you have total control over who and what shows up on your news feed. Do you mind me asking what it is that annoys you about this?

donkeyhotay - 30 September 2011 11:36 AM

The ticker is why I’m leaving Facebook.

but then how will you know how the-girl-who-sat-behind-you-in-10th-grade-Spanish-forty-years ago’s cat looks like today?

deleted obsolete link

I’ve heard this from people and I’ve always found it baffling since you have total control over who and what shows up on your news feed. Do you mind me asking what it is that annoys you about this?

Actually, you don’t have control. Facebook is doing its own editing of what it deems worthy of showing up in any particular newsfeed. And more disturbing, Facebook is starting to track what web sites you visit and automatically post that—although it’s not yet clear to what extent Facebook can do this and how much they’ll make public without your explicit approval. Add to that the fact that Facebook’s privacy and other controls are decentralized, scattered in bits and pieces throughout their interface, and presented without clear information on how to control the info you publish, it’s a recipe for complete abrogation of your privacy. Finally, Facebook has walked all over privacy concerns in the past.

For me, it’s pretty much the last straw. I’ll probably not abandon Facebook entirely, there are too many old acquaintances on it, but I’ve set up a Google+ account and I’ll be posting to Facebook a lot less.

"(Even the verbs “friend” and “unfriend” have been around for centuries.) “

I did not know that.

“(He was also unwittingly recapitulating an age-old argument about the origins of language: scholars from Aristotle to Vico contended that verbs arrived late in our linguistic evolution, built on a bedrock of nouns.)”

Did Aristotle have a case?

(Even the verbs “friend” and “unfriend” have been around for centuries.)

Yes and no. (Caveat on the following. It looks like the OED entry for the verb friend hasn’t been updated since the first edition. So it’s horribly out of date.)

The sense that Facebook uses the verb seems to be new. There is an old use of to friend to mean “befriend,” but it died out in the early seventeenth century and the was primarily used in the passive (one “was friended” by someone, one did not “friend” someone else)

The OED has a single seventeenth century citation of the verb to unfriend, and that in the passive.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were slang uses of the verb in the Facebook sense before Facebook existed, but there is no doubt that the rise in the verb’s popularity is due to Facebook.

Is the verb used outside the context of Facebook and other social media sites? Do people use it to refer to relationships in the meat world?

Mark ripped off his ‘friends’. His friends unfriended and sued him. Mark unreleased some of his major emoluments to his now unfriendly unfriends out of court.

I take it there is no dispute that the Zuckwits invented “to unlike” meaning “to not like anymore”.

Do people use it to refer to relationships in the meat world?

This expression smacked me in the eye - I have never come across it before, and take it to be a reference to the world of flesh and blood, as contrasted with the electronic world of “friends” and “unfriends”. I confess I find it, inexplicably and quite unreasonably, a bit jarring - almost shocking, which is unusual for me**

I keep getting unsolicited, intrusive messages from Facebook, which imply that I have registered with them (which isn’t true - I dont need them, having all the friends I need, in the real [meat?] world, and right now wouldn’t touch Facebook with a bargepole)

** Where does my next door neighbour’s father fit in? - he’s been pretty much a vegetable for the last couple of years ;-)

(Even the verbs “friend” and “unfriend” have been around for centuries.)

Well at least in Dutch they have. ‘Vrienden’ in practically the same sense dates back to at least the 17th century. Under ‘ontvrienden’ WNT has: Mijn vrienden hebt ghy my ont-vrindt, CAMPHUYZEN, Ps. 88, 4 [c. 1626]. (My friends hast thou unfriended me).

Note that it means ‘take away a person’s friends’ here.

This expression smacked me in the eye - I have never come across it before, and take it to be a reference to the world of flesh and blood, as contrasted with the electronic world

It’s been around for a while, probably almost as long as the internet has been public.

There is a great 1991 short story about aliens encountering humans called “They’re Made Out of Meat,” which was filmed here.

Hahahahaha!  Fun to meet someone who is more shocked than me at “meat”. I particlularly loved the bit about “they talk by flapping their meat at each other”.  Brilliant. Thanks, Dave.

Perhaps you are familiar with the term “meatpuppets”, analagous to sockpuppets.

Suppose Bob is involved in an online argument and wants his stupid opinion to appear more popular. He might create other identities, Phil and Barry, and log in as them so that it appears that there are three different people with similar views. Barry and Phil are sockpuppets.

If, instead, he contacts his mates down at Stupid Idea Clubhouse (Judy and Chris), and asks them to get involved in the conversation in order to influence it, even though Judy and Chris were not previously involved in the conversation and might never have seen the site before, Judy and Chris are meatpuppets.

It never occurred to me, until just now, that all the people whose company i enjoy so much on wordorigins.org, might in fact all be figments of the imagination of a psychotic 11-year old supergenius somewhere in Asia, with a way with words.....Oh God

;-)