Chum, pal, sidekick and bro. Talking about friends and friendships
Metaphor and friendship
Sunday 2nd August is International Friendship Day, a day when we're invited to sit back and appreciate our friends and the many ways in which they enhance our lives.
It's a cliché, but friendship is a beautiful thing – there's probably nothing a lot of us like more than spending time with our friends. Do we ever stop to think, though, about how we talk about friendship? What words do we use and why?
In general, we use metaphor to talk about friendship (as we do for so many other topics as well). Unlike idioms, which generally allow very little freedom for variation or invention, metaphors can be adapted, built upon and played with, so long as the central idea remains intact. Once we have grasped the core ideas relating to the topic, we start to use these to create our own metaphors using synonyms to make language more fluent, inventive, poetic, or even amusing. These novel uses may even catch on and find their way into future editions of the dictionary.
the heart, the metaphorical seat of love, is a central idea in words we use to describe friendships and friendliness
Friendship is love
Love is at the very heart of the word friendship. Etymologically, friend means 'loving', as it has its roots in the past participle of a prehistoric Germanic verb meaning 'to love'. Similarly, the ultimate root of the group of words including amicable and amiable is the Latin verb amare, meaning 'to love'. The heart, the metaphorical seat of love, is a central idea in words we use to describe friendships and friendliness. Concord, which is defined as 'friendship and peace between people or countries' literally means 'hearts together' (from com meaning 'with' and cor meaning 'heart'). Cordial, meaning 'friendly', also comes from the stem cor and derives ultimately from the Latin cordialis, meaning 'of the heart'. When we talk about our friendships, we are talking about a relationship of love.
Friendship is closeness
We often describe our friends as close friends, creating an opposition between passing acquaintances, people we just know, and those we know well and like a lot. We feel a strong bond with our close friends and we also talk about the ties of friendship. This same image of closeness is at the root of the word affinity, which started out with the less abstract meaning of 'border', suggesting an image of being side-by-side with somebody, or in more modern terms, shoulder-to-shoulder. We even refer to people's friends as sidekicks, or in Australia, offsiders.
Friendship is sharing
Many words relating to friendship are formed around ones of eating and living together. Convivial comes from the Latin convivialis, which in turn came from convivium. A companion is, literally, someone you share bread with, Latin panis meaning 'bread'. Mate came into English from a Middle Low German word meaning the same – 'someone you share food with' – and which is also where we get the word meat from. Comrade, camaraderie and comradeship all have at their core a sense of 'sharing a room' from the Latin camera meaning 'room'. Though it is not certain, it seems likely that the word chum is a 17th-century shortening of chamber-fellow and was the slang word for a roommate at Oxford University. Our ideas of friendship are founded on metaphors of physical closeness and the sharing of food and accommodation.
Friendship is brotherhood
Parallels are constantly drawn between friends and blood relations. Close male friends often call each other brother or bro. The word pal is the Romany word for brother and was borrowed from that language in the 17th century. The Latin word frater meaning 'brother' is the source of the English fraternity ('feelings of friendship, trust and support between people') and fraternize ('to spend time with someone as friends'). Brotherhood is defined as 'the friendship and support that a group of people, especially men, get from one another'. Actually, it seems unlikely that a group of women would refer to their friendship as 'brotherhood'. And though the word sisterhood is used, the dictionary definition makes it clear that this term is more to do with loyalty between women with a common cause, than to do with friendship per se. Also, women more rarely refer to their female friends as sister, while sis – which we might expect to be used as a female equivalent of bro – is defined in the dictionary as only being used for real sisters. Still, the link between friendship and blood relationships is strong in our language. In many dialects, cousin or cuz is used in the same way to elevate the status of friends to that of members of the family. The Hollies song He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother is the strongest lyrical expression of this metaphor that springs to mind.
What is the difference between a friend and a lover?
So, if we talk about friendships in terms of love, physical closeness, sharing, living together and familial connection, how does a friendship differ from a romantic/sexual relationship? The only difference in this list between friendships and romantic relationships is the metaphor of family connection. Perhaps this difference is drawn to underline the fact that it is not usual to have a sexual relationship with somebody you are related to, and so, if you are metaphorically related to somebody, having sexual relations would be crossing a barrier into another domain. But is sex, then, the only difference between friendship and romantic love?
A look at the way we talk about these two types of relationship reveals even greater differences. The main metaphors used in talking about love are: love as illness and suffering; the lover as mad or a fool; love as hot and burning; the beloved having to be conquered; relationships being fragile. We get a quite different picture when we look at how we talk about friendships.
another characteristic that friends and lovers do not share is the fact that friends come in many varieties and can be described in many ways
Rather than burning us, friendships are warm and cosy. Rather than being fragile or brittle, friendships are described as firm, strong or stalwart (meaning 'having a worthy foundation'). Friends don't split up or break up, they lose contact or drift apart. Those friends who do fall out can make up again. Though the metaphor of physical closeness holds for both types of relationship, lovers are described as together or an item, whereas friends are described as being side-by-side, rather than mingled into one. The strongest difference is that the lover is stricken with love, is passionate ('suffering'), becomes infatuated ('made foolish') and is often mad/crazy/gaga/nuts about the person they love, whereas there is no such thing, at least in our normal vocabulary, as 'mad, passionate friendship'.
Another characteristic that friends and lovers do not share is the fact that friends come in many varieties and can be described in many ways. We have different types of friend according to where or when the friendship was established: school friends, college friends, work friends, family friends etc., whereas a girl/boyfriend or a husband/wife is either precisely that, or a former or ex-girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife. Friends are described as good/close/great/dear/bosom/faithful/trusty/best/old to distinguish them from other friends, whereas you are unlikely to hear anybody refer to their partner as their 'good girlfriend' or 'bosom husband', and an old friend and an old boyfriend are two quite different things.
Fragile relationships vs lasting friendships
A possible conclusion we can draw when we look at the words we use to talk about friendship is that we see our friendships as more stable, more manageable, less fragile, and more varied and open to change than our romantic relationships. This may also be the source of the blood-relationship metaphor, suggesting that we see our relationships with our friends in the same way as we see our relationships with our siblings – important, lasting, dependable yet changeable, able to withstand more of the vicissitudes of life.
It's these very characteristics of friendship that we should be acknowledging and appreciating on 2nd August, when we stop and think about just how much our friends really mean to us.
