Hear, hear Diana and Lauw! I agree with your point of view as well. We do live in the age of mindless chatter and the more " Facebook fiends" we have (just to give an example), the more isolated we become. I think that we pretty much have lost the ability to interact socially face to face in many cases. Would it be correct to say that we sort of live in a virtual world with virtual fiends? The English language in any case seems to be woefully inadequate in this case and "a fiend" is an all encompassing word while a distinction between various shades of social interaction would be very welcome, linguistically speaking. This is , however, coming from a person who has lived long enough to remember when one actually talked to his/her friends face to face over a cup of coffee in a café. Yes, you guessed it. I am not on Facebook. Bea in Ontario