thedanglingmodifier.co.uk

Ever since I came across the Unthank Road in Norwich, I have liked the notion of unthanking people – especially the sort of clients who really have no respect for editorial staff or skills, and who describe plain English as ‘dumbing down’.

The trouble is I often smarm up to my clients by thanking them for seeing me, sending me their nightmare copy, replying to my emails – that sort of thing. Then, when they’re hellish to work for and they don’t appreciate how much I’ve improved their copy, that’s when I’d like to hand them back their work with an invoice and unthank them.

But of course I never do. I just clench my everything and push those emotions back down where they belong.

But this week, I discovered the ‘un’ prefix is a hot topic on the blogosphere, because ‘unfriend’ has become the New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year.

There is some debate as to whether it should be ‘unfriend’ or ‘defriend’ .

I think both are good. But if either one, or both, really takes off and takes hold in the everyday spoken language I will start to feel nostalgic about ‘cutting people off’ and ‘severing connections’.

Over all though, unfriending might be a good thing. Perhaps social networking is making us more polite? We don’t need to argue and fall out any more because we don’t actually have to spend time in each other’s company. We can do all our communication via email and social networking sites.

Whole nations could unfriend other nations instead of making enemies. World peace is on its way. Politicians should have their summits and peace talks online.

And now it seems thousands of contributors are unfriending Wikipedia because they’re unenthusiastic about unwelcome new rules.

What’s especially curious about the way numbers of contributors seem to be declining is illustrated in the Wall Street Journal by a graph headed ‘fading enthusiasm’.

This shows that Wikipedia started out with zero editors in 2003, had acquired about 10,000 by 2006, but now seems to have lost those and 25,00o who never contributed anything. So  now there are minus-25,000 editors complaining about fact-checking and editorial processes on Wikipedia.

It’s amazing what can happen on the worldwide web.  And to think it wasn’t long ago that the self-professed ‘social media evangelists’ were celebrating the rise of the ‘unprofessional’?