How can the word friend possibly describe both the people you went to school with and the people to whom you are connected through Facebook and MySpace? Are friends on the social sites really friends? Is there a better word to describe someone who follows you on Twitter? A caller thinks the English language could use some new words to differentiate among varying levels and types of friendship.
Transcript of “That’s What “Friend” is For? (minicast)”
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Welcome to another minicast from A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett. Martha’s gallivanting around Europe working on the perfect Castilian lisp, and I’ve been packing up my library in preparation for moving house. But we’re also hammering out some fun new ideas for our fall season, which is not all that far away. In the meantime, we’re sharing a few interesting calls with you that didn’t make it on the air last season.
A while back, Andrea called us in her search for words that better describe the levels of friendship we can have. How can the word friend possibly describe both the people you went to school with and the people to whom you are connected through Facebook or MySpace? Are the friends on the social sites really friends? Is there a better word to describe someone who follows you on Twitter?
Andrew, do you really feel like a new word or new words is the solution here? What is the difficulty with the adjectives describing friend? Why doesn’t saying my bicycling friends or my critical mass friends or my MySpace friends, why doesn’t that work for you? I think because it doesn’t describe the level of intimacy and the depth of connection. If you said my special friend or my romantic friend or my longtime friend, I mean, there are different adjectives that we could use.
English is a malleable and flexible language. That’s why we have adjectives and attributive nouns. I wonder if the trouble of popularizing new terms wouldn’t be more trouble than it was worth. Maybe one of the values to doing that, we would be able to name and acknowledge that certain levels of connection amongst strangers or amongst people who are not good friends with us.
Right, right, right. So you’re feeling like English has got a paucity of terms to express relationships. It’s funny. We had a call last year, Martha, didn’t we, about different ways of expressing love in English. And this reminds me a great deal of that. Well, and also the calls that we’ve had about familial relationships, that English isn’t always as specific as other languages when it comes to maternal grandmother or, you know. Well, it’s not specific when we want only a single word.
Exactly. Certainly you can use as many words as you like to describe that relationship and bring the point across. It doesn’t, an idea does not have to be contained in a single word in order to be a valid idea. Yeah, and I think that’s an interesting point here is that, Andrea, you’re wishing that there were a single word for some of these other kinds of relationships, right? Right. Something that would encapsulate it right in one word, perhaps. Yeah. It’s interesting.
It seems as though we don’t really have economy of language when it comes to friends. I mean, I can think of dog friends that I have, you know, who are people whose names I don’t remember, but I remember their dogs’ names. Right. I think Grant, you know, maybe is right is that, you know, we just have to stick to the plethora of adjectives that we have, but there’s not a lot of nouns or, you know.
Well, it’s a good puzzle, Andrea, and I think you’re right. I think we’ll throw this open to our community of listeners online and off and see what they have to say. Maybe they’ve got an idea on how to resolve this dilemma. If you can think of a better way to express degrees of friendship or degrees of intimacy with the people that you know, by all means, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send it to us in an email to words@waywordradio.org. You can also post your ways of describing friends on our website’s discussion forum.
And you can download dozens of full episodes of our program at no charge from our website at waywordradio.org. If you’d like to hear A Way with Words on your local airwaves, why not write or call your public radio station and tell them about our program? For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett in New York City.
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