1418: Verbal 'friend' and Nominal 'react' Oct 29, 2018

Usually, a top-down approach to language change doesn't work; it's why people still end sentences with prepositions for instance, or indeed why we don't speak Old English. It could be argued that this can happen when something popular enough introduces a new way of using language. Famously, 'friend' is now a verb due to Facebook, and while 'befriend' is still used for non-virtual connections, its use is quickly adopted and now quite pervasive. It is not all Facebook's doing however, as the usual phrase was "added as a friend" and things to this effect even on the website; likewise, the increasingly popular nominal 'react' (as in sort of a codified reaction) is now in use, but not because this is how the website began to speak about the feature. In this way, the perpetuation of these words is now encouraged by the website in a way that traditional grammar-books could envy, but it didn't begin with Facebook alone.