A recent survey of trending words has found that popular jargon like ‘social network’, unfriend, text, babe and dude have been around longer than any poplar social networking site like Twitter or Facebook.
Simon Thomas, Oxford English Dictionaries’ blog editor, stated in a post dedicated to words being used by today’s youth that were wrongly believed to be recent additions to the English language, “The verb unfriend, though it has gained widespread currency as the ultimate act of social severance in social media, dates back to 1659… It existed even earlier as a noun — as far back as 1275.”
He went on: “In 1659, Thomas Fuller, Church of England clergyman, wrote in the appeal of injured innocence: ‘I hope, sir, that we are not mutually un-friended by this difference which hath happened betwixt us.'”
Similarly Simon stated that the word text has also been around for a long time. Its first recorded usage was in 1564. Thomas wrote in his blog post, “True, that sense made no mention of the mobile phone (unsurprisingly), meaning instead ‘to cite texts'”.
‘Lol’, is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as laughing out loud since 1989, while a 1960 usage refers to LOL as ‘little old lady’. Likewise, the term ‘Social networks’ has also been around for a long time before Facebook and Twitter. The term means “a system of social interactions and relations”.
Linguist Arika Okrent mentions on Menat Floss, “It is first cited in the OED from J B Gough, who wrote ‘I again became involved in a dissipated social network’ in his 1845 autobiography.”
“Babe”, which has been used as “hot chick”, has been in use since the early 1900s. OED mentions a quote from 1915: “She’s some babe.” Okrent’s list includes words like “dude”, “dudery”, “funky”, “hipster”, “frigging”, “booze” and “tricked out”.
Source: ET