May 2011

Joseph P. Kahn, “What Does ‘Friend’ Mean Now?” (Boston Globe, May 5, 2011)

One expert who doesn’t seem overly troubled by how “friend’’ keeps changing is linguist and language columnist Ben Zimmer. Because words are endlessly flexible, Zimmer says, we shouldn’t expect them to remain immutable but to be used in various ways for various purposes over time.

“People worry that this dilution is impacting (its meaning),’’ says Zimmer. “I see it as the inherent flexibility of language taking on new guises over time.’’

Society often focuses on these semantic shifts, he adds, as a way to complain about larger social phenomena, such as being disconnected geographically — and emotionally — from one’s family and childhood roots. “Words become proxies for anxieties,’’ he says, “in this case anxiety about connections to people’’ in the Facebook age.

Read the rest here.