The Social Language

Just as Brazilians love to talk and be social, they are equally enthusiastic about facebook, twitter, skype and all the rest.

*just a year or two ago everyone had an Orkut account -- now replaced almost completely by facebook.

Some of our readers have been asking us to talk about the current vocabulary of média social.

This, for example form Chris:

Just wanted to make a request: is there a chance you could do some lessons on vocab for Social Media? Things like "friending/unfriending" someone on Facebook. "blocking", spammers, posters, followers, "retweet", "hashtags", always stump me. How do I say "like" a page/post for instance? I'm sure there's a lot of English used ... The other day a Brazilian friend in Rio posted that he was "fazendo um clean" of his Facebook profile! I don't know if this subject is something you've thought of before...? I speak quite good Portuguese but more and more I'm finding it really awkward talking about these things specifically.
 

Bom, most important is that you get the way they "friend" -- they always use the verb adicionar, like this:

Ana > Você tem Facebook?

Tiago > Claro! Pode me adicionar.
Ana > Vou te adicionar, sim.

To DE-FRIEND someone you deleter or, tirar  the person like this:

Clara > Amiga, você me tirou do deu face?
Tania > Sim... Desculpa amiga foi por engano.
Vou te 'ad' novamente.

To LIKE something is to curtir, like this:

*** Note to Chris: "fazendo um clean" is just what you would think it is >> cleaning house. In this case, he means that he's tidying-up his facebook network (or, rather : removing some "friends")