Mad hot verbing

I could pick any of a mess of words that we’ve twisted ’round in recent times, yes I could, and I could rant on the twisting until time ends. You’d all leave, though, if I did that, and you’d never come back.

And I want you to come back. So today I’m just going to pick three examples of twisted usage, and I’ll rant only briefly. Three examples of “verbing” — using nouns as verbs — and all of them representative of social computing.

Text

We “text him” now, instead of “send him a text message”, the way we would “mail him” or “telephone him” in earlier times (or “interface with him”, oy!). This was an inevitable one, and entirely expected, yet it somehow grates on me anyway, probably just because I’m an old dog. On the other hand, I do still tend to say, “Send me email,” rather than, “Email me,” so maybe I remain an even older dog than I realize.

Friend

Truth be told, this one is more of a resurrection, a renaissance, than a neologism. “Friend” used to be a verb, but it’s been replaced by “befriend” in recent centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary labels all senses of it as obsolete, archaic, or poetic.

So maybe that’s it; maybe we can say that our current use of “friend” as a verb is “poetic”. Not much poetry in this sort of thing, though (from an online forum; the URL isn’t really relevant):

So I friended him on facebook a few days after last weeks class b/e it was going to be another two week interval between our classes (thanksgiving) and I wanted to keep our relationship growing. he friended me back and I commented his wall, but he never wrote back to me.

A Google search for "friended me" (with the quotes) turns up almost 40,000 hits.

Favorite

Whether you spell this with “o” or with “ou”, it’s an up-and-coming verb, for better or worse. And this, too, was a matter of time: to “favorite” a web page means to add it to your “favorites list”. You’ll see it at the bottom of every entry on Boing Boing, such as this one:

I’m guessing that we’re going to see this one used more and more, for other things than web pages or blog/discussion entries. Now that we have shared “favorite lists”, there’s a lot of social value in “favoriting” everything from music and movies to restaurants and bars. And then, of course, we have to deal with “favorite spam”, where folks artificially bump their popularity by arranging to be “favorited” by more people.

The Internet can be a strange place.