Blame it on social media, where the word was born.

Blame it on the madness surrounding social media, where the need for such a word became clear.

Blame it on a bad economy and political polarization, where the function is used with great zeal.

But the New Oxford American Dictionary says unfriend is its word of the year for 2009.

Unfriending someone, of course, is removing them from your friends list on sites like Facebook or Myspace.

Even simple jokes have been enough to make some of the more uptight people in one’s contact list start purging people. More serious political debates are even a bigger trigger. A friend informed me that they had suddenly lost a few folks after commenting on President Obama’s plan to address school children. She said it shouldn’t be a big deal that a president should talk to kids; a few of her more ultra-conservative friends, convinced Obama’s message would be an overt push for Socialism to little Suzy and little Johnny, marked her off their list.

Other word-of-the-year candidates included hashtag, a Twitter term for its keyword system; sexing, the transmission of adult-content pictures and text messages, generally sent by kids; intoxicated, to describe text-distracted drivers.

Other candidates included freemium, funemployed, and birther.

Political stubbornness knows no limit.