In the past few days, I performed two highly unusual acts: I chose to gift a relative and to friend someone on Facebook. You say this is no big deal?<\/p>\n
Let me explain:<\/p>\n
At the school I attended three-fourths of my life ago, Immaculate Conception, in Las Vegas, our English teacher, Margaret Kennedy (after whom Highlands\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Kennedy Hall is named), drilled into us the notion that there are verbs and there are nouns.<\/p>\n
Sounds simple enough, and we all know that many English words, such as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153race,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dream\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can be both parts of speech. You can race (verb) in a race (noun) and you can dream a dream. But what I now have trouble with is the wholesale verbing of nouns, which appears to be a partial result of the Internet generation.<\/p>\n
The main grammatical point I make here is that we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t meet or make friends anymore; instead, we \u00e2\u20ac\u0153friend\u00e2\u20ac\u009d them. And rather than giving a gift to someone, we get rid of that annoying participle and simply \u00e2\u20ac\u0153gift\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that person.<\/p>\n
Lately, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve received a number of renewal solicitations which encourage me to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153gift\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a subscription to someone. If I renew my subscription to National Geographic or Atlantic Monthly, for example, I can \u00e2\u20ac\u0153gift\u00e2\u20ac\u009d up to three friends. Their year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s subscription for them is absolutely free; however, when the year is up, I expect to be \u00e2\u20ac\u0153gifting\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the same magazines again, to the same people, who will have gotten used to the gratis stuff that comes in the mail.<\/p>\n
This round of gifting is bound to be expensive. And so as not to appear like a real cheap-oh, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll probably go through the process again.<\/p>\n
Now, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153friending\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is a slightly different matter. A year or so back, I joined Facebook. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a social network, the subject of a recent movie, and a way to get re(acquainted) with loads of people. Participants can vent, deliver birthday greetings, complain, praise, brag and even post photos.<\/p>\n
Facebook also provides a way for users to share photos and even albums. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve posted hundreds of images in albums whose titles range from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Around Town\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Senior Profile\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Desperately Seeking a Caption.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And that activity doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t cover my newly acquired activity of playing a version of Facebook Scrabble with a dozen people.<\/p>\n
Facebook can be a wonderful way to keep in touch with others, but it has also modified the language. I believe today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s social network society has rendered the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153friend\u00e2\u20ac\u009d virtually useless. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s almost as if we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve inflated the word through overuse, in the same way that a dime used to mean something but no longer does.<\/p>\n
Notice how freely the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153friend\u00e2\u20ac\u009d gets tossed around. Kids come home the first week of school, bragging, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve made lots of new friends, but my best friends are Heather, Mikayla and Brittany.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But next week, the names are subject to change without notice. Have you heard people complaining about their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153worst friends\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? If they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re that bad, are they\u00c2\u00a0even friends?<\/p>\n
The classical meaning of friend ought to be more than simply someone you enjoy seeing at a party. Friendship needs to involve trust, empathy and mutual interests. A friend will always \u00e2\u20ac\u0153be there\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for you. But today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s semantic stretch of the word has made it all-inclusive, as if everyone who signs on to your Facebook page suddenly earns the hallowed title of friend.<\/p>\n
Another reason for bringing up Facebook is that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve observed various reactions to it. One friend -er- acquaintance acted as if joining Facebook were like signing up for a satanic cult and simultaneously dooming our souls to perdition while opening up our private lives to the whole world.<\/p>\n
Actually, Facebook does neither. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true that reputations can be marred through this medium, and perhaps some people may have even contemplated suicide while being members. However, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not Facebook that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s causing it; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the abuse of the medium, the reality that there are predators and other weird people around. Being on Facebook is about as innocuous as sharing a large party line on the telephone. When phones were a novelty in the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc40s, there were four numbers on our partyline. The four residences were all on Railroad Avenue, and each number, with its distinctive ring, had someone named Arthur: Byers, Madrid, McElroy and Trujillo.<\/p>\n
Currently, I have 160 people on my Facebook page identified as friends. Many are relatives, some work-place acquaintances; others church-connected, or perhaps people from my past, fellow teachers, former students, kids I grew up with on Railroad Avenue. Others, called Friends of a Friend, or FOAFs, might have more than a thousand with the distinction of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153friend.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
On my Facebook blog, I doubt that I know half these \u00e2\u20ac\u0153friends.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I spend time each week updating photos and news snippets. For a recent octogenarian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s birthday, I posted a dozen photos and announced they were available for viewing. But the catch is that we need to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153friend\u00e2\u20ac\u009d someone to enable them to gain access to our Facebook page. That act helped to increase the friend quotient.<\/p>\n
Unless we come up with a word not as strong as friend but not as cold and impersonal as acquaintance, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll continue to devalue the Facebook word until it becomes meaningless.<\/p>\n
Language change is inevitable. For example, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ride\u00e2\u20ac\u009d serves as a verb and a noun, as in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I ride in the car\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I went for a ride,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But have you noticed that now \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ride\u00e2\u20ac\u009d refers to the usually new vehicle itself, as in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He drives a nice ride\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? And new books have become nice \u00e2\u20ac\u0153reads.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
That usage of the language still baffles me. Maybe after checking out the fare at a restaurant with people I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve friended, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be better able to accept the wholesale turning verbs into nouns. With luck, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll friend someone who might even gift my eats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the past few days, I performed two highly unusual acts: I chose to gift a relative and to friend someone on Facebook. You say this is no big deal? Let me explain: At the school I attended three-fourths of my life ago, Immaculate Conception, in Las Vegas, our English teacher, Margaret Kennedy (after whom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=806"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":807,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions\/807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}