The verb \"ghost\" to mean \"leave a social event without announcing one's departure\" has apparently been around for a while, but I wasn't aware of it until a couple of weeks ago when I happened upon this 7\/3\/13 article in Slate by Seth Stevenson:<\/p>\n
\"Don\u2019t Say Goodbye:\u00a0 Just ghost.<\/a>\"<\/p>\n Because I have often felt awkward and embarrassed about wanting to leave a social gathering before bidding adieu at least to the hosts, but not finding a suitable moment to say goodbye, I immediately became enamored of this new (to me) verb because it sanctioned an impulse that I was previously unable to act upon.<\/p>\n Here are three key paragraphs from Stevenson's article:<\/p>\n Ghosting\u2014aka the Irish goodbye, the French exit, and any number of other vaguely ethnophobic terms\u2014refers to leaving a social gathering without saying your farewells. One moment you\u2019re at the bar, or the house party, or the Sunday morning wedding brunch. The next moment you\u2019re gone. In the manner of a ghost. \u201cWhere\u2019d he go?\u201d your friends might wonder. But\u2014and this is key\u2014they probably won\u2019t even notice that you\u2019ve left.<\/p>\n Yes, I know. You\u2019re going to tell me it\u2019s rude to leave without saying goodbye. This moral judgment is implicit in the culturally derogatory nicknames ghosting has been burdened with over the centuries. The English have been calling it French leave<\/em> since 1751, while the French have been referring to filer \u00e0 l'anglaise<\/em> since at least the late 1800s. As with other cross-Channel insults\u2014depending on your side, a condom is either a French letter<\/em> or la capote anglaise<\/em>, syphilis the French disease<\/em> or la maladie anglaise<\/em>\u2014the idea is to pin unsavory behavior on your foes.<\/p>\n Here in the U.S., the most-used term seems to be Irish goodbye<\/em>, which, due to unfortunate historical stereotyping, hints that the vanished person was too tipsy to manage a proper denouement. Dutch leave<\/em> is a less common, but apparently real, variant. (I picture someone taking a couple pulls on a vaporizer, scarfing too much bitterballen, and stumbling into the night.) And then there\u2019s the old, presumably Jewish joke: WASPs leave and don\u2019t say goodbye, Jews say goodbye and don\u2019t leave.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ben Zimmer called to my attention the fact that an associated sense of \"ghost,\" meaning \"abruptly end a relationship by cutting off communication, especially online,\" won in the Most Likely to Succeed category in the 2015 ADS WOTY voting<\/a>.\u00a0 Ben also mentioned an article titled \"Ghosting<\/a>\" on the newer dating-related sense of \"ghosting\" by Jane Solomon of Dictionary.com (who also works with him on the \"Among the New Words\" feature for American Speech<\/i>).<\/p>\n It's not very honorable to ghost someone you've been dating for months.\u00a0 On the other hand, it may be the only half-dignified way to get out of a relationship that is no longer bringing pleasure to either of the parties involved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The verb \"ghost\" to mean \"leave a social event without announcing one's departure\" has apparently been around for a while, but I wasn't aware of it until a couple of weeks ago when I happened upon this 7\/3\/13 article in Slate by Seth Stevenson: \"Don\u2019t Say Goodbye:\u00a0 Just ghost.\" Because I have often felt awkward […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[251,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-society","category-semantics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33529"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33557,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33529\/revisions\/33557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}