In the last few years, social networking has risen to an all new level of ubiquity. With almost everyone having an account on Orkut (and now Facebook), and celebrities keeping in touch with their countless fans by making FB pages, most people have a large pool of online friends – people that are on your friend list, but who you haven't had any actual contact with.
This poses two problems: on one hand, you have the show-off crowd – people who take pride in having big friend lists (ergo, loads of friends) without a modicum of real friendship. Especially when it comes to adding girls, these people take pride in calling XX their friend simply because she was generous (?) enough not to reject their friendship request. Since celebrities often interact with their fans on such portals, it is not uncommon to see people claiming to be friends of a particular movie star or VJ simply because that star replied to their comment on FB/re-shared their tweet, or for similar lame reasons.
On the other hand, there are people like me, who are rather picky about who they call friends (people are actually close), as opposed to acquaintances (people with whom I have interacted in real life but do not consider them close enough to be friends), and feel annoyed that they often have to refer to many non-friends as friends simply because they have them on their FB friend list.
To solve this problem, it is imperative that we disambiguate the two meanings, and I propose a new term - frand. It is to bridge the gap in vocabulary that has been created by the proliferation of online friendship.
frand /frænd/ –noun
A person who the speaker knows only because they are present in the speaker's friend list on a social networking website.
The term has been taken from the unintentional misspelling of the word friend used by many Indian teenagers in phrases like frandship/making frandship/wanting frandship/wanting to be frandzzz/franz who either a) can't spell any better or b) consider this usage cool/hip.
Once frand is a word, people won’t be able to refer to random girls (who don't even know them) as their friends without being blatantly untruthful. Also, guys won't need to feel jealous of other guys who continuously make references to girls who, supposedly, are their friends, but in reality, just frands. Moreover, girls might be less reluctant in accepting frandship requests, because, after all, they are just saying yes to becoming a frand (as opposed to friend), and this will in turn boost the chances of eventually upgrading a girl from frand to friend status.
One major problem that I see is that frand merely sounds like an uneducated pronunciation of friend, instead of a word in itself. This, frankly, is exactly what it originally was, but I intend this coinage to be a sarcastic reference, and therefore, it fits the bill.
References
http://www.lol-land.in/posts/view/12 presents a humorous take on the use of the word frand
http://2basco.com/2008/12/10/can-i-make-frandsheep-to-you-piss-off-freak/ discusses the frandsheep phenomenon.
http://zh-hk.facebook.com/pages/Will-you-be-my-frandsheep/273612054067?v=info and http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2259641070 are FB pages/groups mocking the same.
3 people weren't lazy:
need to modify that defn, it's one sided. As in A is B's "frand" but what is B of A then? A could be a celebrity and hence known to B not just through social n/w. The concept of friend, I think, works in both directions.
hehe! True. More so in orkut than fb. But dont you think its a slight exaggeration of the situation?
Nice post FRAAND.. ^_^
Also, adding 200+ friends on facebook is pretty lame if you ask me.
Post a Comment