They verbed a noun/adjective! There’s a long, proud tradition of verbing nouns and nouning verbs in the business world. “What’s the ask?” “Let’s solution the problem.”
I had a boss that repeatedly used the non-word “orientationated” when he meant “oriented” (or in British English, “orientated”). I guess he got a volume discount on vowels.
It bugs the shit out of me when people use the term “utilized” when they really mean “used”. I’ve tried to explain a few times that “utilized” has a specific technical meaning, but it has unfortunately fallen in popular parlance to be a synonym for “use”.
I haven’t come across “favourited” before, but there is an abominable and growing artificial dialect of English that I call “computerese” which is almost as objectionable as biz-speak. Biz-speak is worse because almost all of it is completely unnecessary and is basically just self-aggrandizing pomposity. Computerese is annoying but at least some of the words serve some nominal purpose (though certainly not “favourited”). But we do live in a world where a laptop is no longer just the top of your lap, where tweeting is no longer something that only birds do, and where “like” is now both an active verb (“please like my tweet”) as well as both a noun and a meaningless adverb (“I got, like, two dozen likes on Xitter”).
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So allegedly the term “unalived” has entered the vernacular amongst the youth. The term originating among content creators on YouTube, tiktok, etc. where the algorithm will penalize your content if you use words like “die” or “kill”.
Though it has to be said I’ve only encountered it in the context of posts saying stuff like “look at this dumb term the idiot kids are using” not actually being used unironically
How much longer must we suffer through this attack on coinages by the everyday speakers of the English language - the only ones who in toto decide what the language is?
Yes, in the olden days - which were scummy at best and rancid in most forms - elite writers of the language were the only ones noted and the only ones whose opinions counted. They invented idiocies like the prohibition on ending a sentence with a preposition or splitting an infinitive. Those are the people we’re supposed to emulate?
The opinions of the elites no longer count. Get used to it. The trend only started before you were born so you’re a bit slow if you don’t recognize its power, not to mention ubiquity. You don’t have to use any of the nouned verbs or verbed nouns if you prefer not to, although you probably do so many times a day without realizing it since English is rife with examples that are hundreds of years old and totally accepted by even the most pure purists. Does that make you hypocritical? Only if you condemn others for their usage.
I’d just about guarantee it’s a neologism meant to signify that you’ve indicated that the files in their system are “favorites”.
Usually what gets me isn’t stuff like that, it’s when words that have specific meanings are co-opted by some sort of business-speak or something like that, and replace other words with perfectly good meanings. For example, one of the “in” things right now is to talk about the “ask” from the business(or whoever). Request is the proper word- ask is a verb, not a noun. Or the hoary old use of “leverage” as a verb, as opposed to the more common noun usage.