Pen Ultimate / To like or not to like, that is the question

As of the beginning of this week, about 687,000,000 people all over the world like Facebook enough to log into their accounts on the social network at least once a month. Of those, about 3.4 million are Israelis, and they hold the current world record in terms of the time spent per month on the site (according to comScore, a digital marketing service ): 10.6 hours.

I guess that for someone in the business world the data above is worth its weight in gold, as "time is money," according to Benjamin Franklin, and he should know, since his face stares out at us from the $100 bill. But to those who prefer to spend their time on words - like me - this phenomenon is significant because it means that many people around the globe apparently share the same perception of two words: "friend" and "like."

The Oxford English Dictionary, the accepted authority on the English language, defines "friend" as "a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations" (the word is derived from an Indo-European root meaning "to love" ). In Facebook-ese, however, a "friend" can be a virtual stranger (actually, an actual stranger ), who requests the virtual pleasure of your friendship, or confirms such a request from you.

It stands to reason that if you join Facebook, you are hungry for friendship, at least of the virtual variety. Otherwise, you might not be spending your (valuable? ) time online. Ostensibly, social network courtesy dictates your acceptance of offers of friendship as they arrive, if for no other reason than to enjoy reciprocity, in keeping with the teachings of our sage Hillel, who stated that the whole Torah is a commentary on the dictum "What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor" (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat ).

But in the same way as we teach our children not to accept sweets from strangers, there should be a way in the case of Facebook as well to avoid temptation and be somewhat discriminating - for instance, by finding out something about the prospective friend from his online profile. But the odd thing here is that many friendly offerings come from individuals who do not allow you to see their profile information.

You can accept such a request, of course, and live dangerously, even in virtual reality. Alternatively, instead of clicking "confirm request," you can use the "ignore" option, which in essence dispatches the request to the dustbin of virtual history, while the rejected person is none the wiser. What you have done in that case is to "quietly ignore" the request, and that allows you to snub the world and be a chooser even though you are a beggar.

Etymology question about a Swedish word - Straight Dope Message Board

While watching a Swedish movie today, I was reminded of a question that has always bugged me. The word for "and" in Swedish is "och". In Danish it's "og". These are obviously cognates with each other, but they don't seem to be cognates with the English "and", the German "und", the Dutch, "en" etc. etc. My best guess for a cognate of "och" would be the English "eke" (archaic word for also) or the German "auch" (same meaning). Where did "och" come from? What happened to cognates for and/en/und in the Northern Germanic languages? http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=and says that O.N. (which I am assuming means "Old Norse") had a cognate for it called "enn". Does this word still exist and how is it used now? So it appears that "och" came from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning some thing like "increased by" or "added to", while "and" came from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning something like "paired with" or "next to". So perhaps in Proto-Germanic there were two ways of saying "and", one of which (the root for "och") meant something like "in addition to" and the other of which (the root of "and") meant something like "with". In some Germanic languages, the first of these words dropped out and only the second remained to mean "and". In other Germanic languages, the second of these words dropped out and only the first remained to mean "and". Somebody is now going to ask, "What? There's an etymology for a simple word like 'and'? Doesn't a word meaning 'and' exist in every language and doesn't it always mean the same thing and not change?" Well, no. Even simple words like conjunctions and prepositions slowly change in meaning. They are derived from other words and they can drop from a language. When we get down to the particle word level the variations in historically related languages get pretty interesting in a sort of "what is is " way. For instance, in Old Norse, the declination of the numeric adjective "second" is very irregular. Some inflections are based on a root similar to other in English or oder in German. "Other"--that sounds rather random until you recall the phrase "every other day"="every second day".

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