My objection, if you read my post carefully, is not that Word of the Year should be given to an old word, as you seem to be suggesting. My claim is, however, that Word of the Year shouldn’t be given to such a lazy word. These words, while new, really depict language shrinkage. People are too lazy to merely say “I have removed this person as a friend”, so they say “unfriend” instead. This doesn’t seem like a problem to you? There are a multitude of words, as you must know, that are unique yet are being lost because they’re not as “convenient”. You don’t think this is unfortunate?

I appreciate your assumption of my intelligence in the second to last paragraph; indeed I realize that all of language has been “made up” by cultures throughout history. But you cannot deny that the recent trend of new words, such as the ones I mentioned in my post, do not have the same originality that other words do. They are a mashed together version of what people want to convey but are too lazy to say. I am suggesting the Word of the Year be given to a more genuinely creative word, not something that has been shrunk for convenience.

Thanks for the suggestion at the end of your post.

Personally, I’d have chosen one of the other two words instead. Firstly, I see “defriend” much more often than “unfriend”. Secondly, “sexting” and “netbook” seem to me to be used far more often than either “unfriend” or “defriend”. I do not see why classiness or the fact that “sexting” has to do with human sexuality should have any effect, positive or negative, on whether or not the word’s impact should be recognized.

When you say “made up word”, what do you mean? Your post recognizes that “The Oxford Dictionary, as well as many others, make it a point of adding new words to their lists all the time in order to keep the dictionary in sync with current language usage.” And your writing and interest in this topic make it clear that you are both intelligent and experienced enough that you must have recognized a long time ago that all words were at some point made up.

Also, you may be interested in Word of the Day. It honors the sort of words you enjoy. I subscribed to it for quite a while.