since the early 2000s along with the rise in popularity of social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This has spawned new vocabularies associated with each new social media venue, such as the use of the term "friending" on Facebook, which is a verbification of "friend" used to describe the process of adding a new person to one's group of friends on the website, despite the existence of an analogous term "befriend". This term is much older than Facebook, but has only recently entered the popular lexicon. Other examples of slang in social media demonstrate a proclivity toward shortened words or acronyms. These are especially associated with services such as Twitter, which () has a 280-character limit for each message and therefore requires a relatively brief mode of expression. This includes the use of hashtags which explicitly state the main content of a message or image, such as #food or #photography. Debates about slang Some critics believe that when slang becomes more commonplace it effectively eradicates the "proper" use of a certain language. However, academic (descriptive) linguists believe that language is not static but ever-changing and that slang terms are valid words within a language's lexicon. While prescriptivists study and promote the socially preferable or "correct" ways to speak, according to a language's normative grammar and syntactical words, descriptivists focus on studying language to further understand the subconscious rules of how individuals speak, which makes slang important in understanding such rules. Noam Chomsky, a founder of anthropological linguistic thought, challenged structural and prescriptive grammar and began to study sounds and morphemes functionally, as well as their changes within a language over time. In popular culture The 1941 film, Ball of Fire, portrays a professor played by Gary Cooper who is researching and writing an encyclopedia article about slang. See also A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew Slang dictionary Urban Dictionary References External links A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant, Albert Barrère and Charles Godfrey Leland (1889 edition, full text, at Wikimedia Commons). The Online Slang Dictionary – American and English terms, features other statistical information. SlangLang – Popular slang words with their meaning, origin and spread Language varieties and styles Linguistics terminology Sociolinguistics Youth culture