You Can't Overuse the Word ‘Friend’

Ever since Facebook came up with the concept of a social media ‘friend’ in the 2000s, and to be fair probably for far longer, though I wasn’t old enough to observe it then, people have been expressing an opinion that goes roughly like this: Most people have very few true friends. When we call everyone we know ‘friends,’ we devalue the meaning of the word. We should use the word only for people who meet some threshold of true friendship. …where the threshold might be something like “willing to help you in time of need” or “good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves.”1 The first two parts of that imaginary opinion2 are statements of fact, and I mostly agree with them. It’s correct that most people don’t have many ‘true’ friends, assuming a meaningful definition of ‘true.’ It’s correct that calling everyone a friend eventually drains the word of its strength. What I disagree with is the third part: that we should stop using th

Ever since Facebook came up with the concept of a social media ‘friend’ in the 2000s, and to be fair probably for far longer, though I wasn’t old enough to observe it then, people have been expressing an opinion that goes roughly like this: Most people have very few true friends. When we call everyone we know ‘friends,’ we devalue the meaning of the word. We should use the word only for people who meet some threshold of true friendship. …where the threshold might be something like “willing to help you in time of need” or “good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua g