The New Oxford American Dictionary announced unfriend as its Word of the Year, but some people (i.e. some Twitter users) are complaining that they use or prefer to use defriend rather than unfriend. Having never heard defriend until yesterday, I’m squarely in the unfriend camp, and in the interest of combating some dubious linguistic claims, I’d like to review the meanings of these prefixes.
There are two un- prefixes in English. One is the negative un- which functions similar to the prefixes in- or non-. The other indicates a reverse or opposite action: undo.
- un: not, lacking, or contrary
- unhappy
- unlikely
- unattractive
- uneducated
- unconstitutional
- unchristian
- unamerican
- un: reverse/opposite action
- untie
- unzip
- unwind
- undo
- unfasten
- uncork
- unring the bell
- unbreak my heart
de- also means reverse or opposite action, but unlike the second type of un-, it also indicates removal.
- de: reverse/opposite action or removal
- deactivate
- decode
- deconstruct
- defuse
- defragment
- de-ice
- de-junk
- debug
- debunk
Thus, both forms are valid, and the arguments that unfriend is unacceptable because un- signifies negation are totally specious. Unfriend is a wonderful word—I mean, remember when friend was a noun and not a reversible action?!
As someone who (totally speciously!) made the argument for “de-” in a comment thread by erroneously pegging “un” to negation, I should say that my rationalization against “un” wasn’t as important as my preference for “de.” To me the important thing is the explicit REMOVAL aspect of “de-” — to “defriend” someone is to forcibly remove them from your social network, permanently, whereas most of the “un” examples here are (often easily) reversible, which, though technically true of “removed” friends, doesn’t feel true. De-friending is a permanent one-way process. Just as one for the most part can’t “rebug” or “rebunk,” one doesn’t really “refriend” — it’s a much more significant statement than that, I think, though maybe that’s just me. I can’t imagine any context whatsoever in which I’d re-friend someone I de-friended.
