Joe Satran at Delphi

On Wednesday, Joe bemoaned on this very blog Facebook’s use of the “word” unlike.  Well, Joe it seems is blessed with the divine foresight of the oracles.

A mere three days after his post, Ben Zimmer’s “On Language” column in the Times magazine makes the same observation:

Facebook, for instance, allows you to register approval for a posted message [...] by clicking a thumbs-up like button. Toggling off the button results in unliking your previously liked item. Note that this is different from disliking something, since unliking simply returns you to a neutral state.

I think Zimmer has been reading Bullblog.  Earlier in the article, he quotes “Yale University linguist Laurence R. Horn,” so clearly Mr. Zimmer has his inner eye fixed on New Haven.  One may note, too, that while Mr. Zimmer’s article is a descriptive overview of the current state of un- words in English, Joe takes the bolder prescriptivist stance, essentially challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a duel with rapiers.  I’ll gladly be his second.

In related news, am I the only one worried about poor Will Safire’s health?

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