Friends

Wednesday while teaching my Upper Beginning Reading and Writing class one of my students, a young woman from Russia, asked me about the word "friend". She said that friend has a different meaning in Russian, it means someone you are close to and know what is going on in their life. I said, that it was the same in English. Then she told me an anecdote of an American neighbor that had introduced her to another friend. A few weeks later my student asked her neighbor how the friend was doing. The neighbor replied, "I don't know, we really don't know each other well." Hmmm, I replied. Maybe she was right, as I thought of my FaceBook "friends" many (most) are really not people I would consider friends. She said in Russia they use the word acquaintance. I said, yes, we have that word too.

I know language is ever evolving unless it is a dying language. I wonder if social media will change the definition of "friend", replacing acquaintance (or someone I met once on a beach when I was drunk. )Will we develop new words for different levels of friends, or perhaps just add adjectives, best, true, quasi? Or perhaps we could define friends by what we know about them. Categories such as people whose birthday I know, whose birthday month I know, I (think)know which season they were born in, and I have no fucking idea, nor do I care.