The F-Word

No...not that F-word.  Get your minds out of the gutters, people.

Probably the best episode of "Modern Family" ever.

My post is about a different "F-word" that gets thrown around a lot:  friend.  How often do you hear yourself or others use the phrase "my friend from work..." or "my friend from church..." in conversation when describing something said or done by someone you/they happen to know?

I've found that a lot of people are very liberal with this F-word; they're like the Samuel L. Jacksons of the word "friend."  I, however, don't say that people are my "friends" very often.  One practical reason is specificity.  "Friend" is very generic, and if the means through which I know someone is important to the anecdote, I would much rather refer to someone as my co-worker or my roommate or my visiting teacher.

The main reason for my lack of liberality with the F-word is that I have a very conservative definition of what constitutes a friend.  A friend is not just someone I talk to when I see them at church or work or wherever.  A friend is something much more intimate than amicable acquaintance.  A friend is someone whose welfare I think about even when I'm not around them, someone who I would go out of my way to see or talk to, someone with whom I can share good or bad news, someone I trust with my feelings.  Also, a friend is someone who feels all those same things about me.

I hope I don't offend people when I refer to them as acquaintances, or as my hybrid-term (patent pending) "friend-quaintances."  It doesn't mean they'll never ever be my friend; it just means that I'm not quite there yet, but if/when it happens, it'll be good.