To befriend or to "unfriend"

Right, so we have yet another new term, courtesy of the ever-sprawling Internet: Unfriend. That is, to remove a person as a friend from you extraordinarily sprawling social circle in the Kingdom of Facebook. Yes, my online spelling checker does not approve and neither do I. For one, "unfriend" is grammatically improper - un-friend implies "to friend" is a valid verb, which any proper English speaker will know it is not. "Friend" is a noun and has had sole claim to that part of speech for quite some time now. To befriend is the verb. To unfriend is neither this nor that. It's void not verb.

Now that I have driven home that point with a mallet, let us get on to the intended meaning of the grammatically unhappy term. Someone commented in an article in the NY Times of 29 January 2009 that a friends list of around a 100 persons implies an intimate circle of friends. A 100 persons? Intimate? Since when can one be intimate with a 100 persons? I can hardly keep up on normal terms with 10 and it would take some convincing that anyone else can do much better than that. I mean, I am a dedicated sort of person, you know.

But, now that I have blown my horn a bit, let us consider to be intimate or not to be intimate. Quite clearly there has been some dilution of intent here. Old story of modern times, I say. We dilute almost all things for faster gain at ever shrinking profit margins. Large turnover, small profit margin, that is. As if the experience of real close friendship can accumulate over many superficial friendships to some fat bottom line as in some business model from Harvard. What delusional rubbish!

So, should one prune the list or not prune the list? Well, it feels somewhat impolite to turn down a friend request on Facebook and rather insensitive to revoke a friend status. But then, turning down friendship happens in everyday life as part of the social code anyway. Ever since childhood one has known the feeling of being turned down by a group or a single person one would have liked to befriend. And one also stops being friends with some people. Perhaps, one should reconsider what "friend" means before applying or accepting friendship requests. It really means something more than just plain acquaintance or boasting numbers.