In the game of marketing, this ever-shifting technology is our greatest friend and our worst enemy. We look like visionary heroes to our clients when we create an embedded Twitter feed that auto-substitutes a series of handwriting fonts for their micro-site. But the next day they are frustrated beyond words when we tell them that they can’t put that simple video into their Powerpoint presentation.

So what to do? Should we shield our clients from the icky inner workings so we appear to be all-knowing technology magicians who work miracles—only to on occasion disappoint completely when our wand turns out to be incompatible with the archaic legacy platform their inventory database is built on? Or should we pull our clients into the technology swamp with us so they can can empathize with the slogging, sloppy mess that it can so often be?

The latter approach might mean technology loses some of its romance, but at least 12:30 AM tech support phone calls might become just that much more pleasant.

Oxford University Press USA, in a blog post, said “unfriend”, a verb, had beaten netbook, sexting, paywall, birther and death panel for the honour.

“Unfriend has real lex-appeal,” said Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program.

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” she said. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for word of the year.”

Previous words of the year include carbon neutral, locavore and hypermiling.

Locavores are people who eat locally grown food while hypermilers modify their cars and driving techniques to maximise petrol mileage.