The Definition of “Friend”

Prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: acquaint and/or friend.

 

What does it really mean to be a friend? As short as twenty years ago, it wasn’t a hard word to define. You had best friends, you had friends, you had acquaintances. Or so I’ve been told.

Now, there are not only so many types of friends (Facebook friends, twitter friends, video game friends, online friends (who may or may not fall into any of the previous categories), etc.), no one uses the word acquaintance anymore. How many of the people you’re ‘friends’ with in really life are your actual friends? Sometimes the people I spend time with playing video games with seem like better friends to me than the people I’ll hang out with at the bar. It’s not true for all of my friends, but for some.

And what about all of those so-called Facebook friends? On the other end of the spectrum, I know I have friends on there that are people I knew in high school from across the room from some class I barely remember the details of. People I wasn’t actually friends with when I was there, and people I most likely will never want to catch up with. I hated high school. I find that’s usually true of people who don’t mind real life. I don’t mind it.

I guess what I’m saying is that the definition for ‘friends’ has become a bit blurry, and I can’t remember the last time I had a set definition for who in my life the term actually referred to, if I ever did.

To put it into perspective, I think the word ‘friend’ has come to mean so little (or too many things, depending on how you look at it), that even though I like to think my grammar and spelling is generally on par without the need for spell check, is still had to correct myself from typing ‘freind’ more than once.

This post is part of SoCS: http://lindaghill.com/2015/02/27/special-edition-friday-prompt-for-socs-february-2815/

and Love Is In Da Blog: https://justfoolingaroundwithbee.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/love-is-in-da-blog-february-ping-back-post-rulessuggestions-week-4/

Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions

P.S. On a completely unrelated note, can someone let me know how the background looks to them? It looks pretty good to me, but I’m pretty sure the box is going to shift for someone with a different sized screen…

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Brittney

Artist. Writer. Filmmaker. Bibliophile. Photographer. Herbivore. Not necessarily in that order. Actually, yeah, that order.

18 thoughts on “The Definition of “Friend””

  1. My mother used to say that if you had one or two good friends in your life you were blessed. I like the Twitter term “follower” better, because there’s a good chance you don’t know the person you’ve friended… At least, that’s been my experience.

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  2. “Freind” sounds very southern German 🙂 thanks for sharing your thoughts. I have to ponder that because I hardly think about the FB friend thing anymore even though it annoyed me a lot in the beginning because I did not consider many I connected with on FB as friends. Even though I found a few really good ones :-). Thanks

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  4. Lovely lovely lovely!! Absolutely lovely! You know something is wrong in the world when friendships depend on if they have “liked” your profile picture or not…

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  7. What a great post! Excellent point you have raised about how fickle “friends” have become. So often I see fights breaking out because a friend did not “like” their new profile picture on facebook. And we say we have come a long way?

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  8. Hi Brittany, you raise some very important points in this post. I agree the definition of ‘friend’ has changed as per thanks to facebook where its become a term used to indicate how many people follow your page…..which in fact is a meaningless number unless you are one of those folk who loves to accumulate numbers….enjoyed your contribution.

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  9. It’s so true! And not only has the word “friend” changed meanings in the basic sense, it’s become a verb. 😛
    Thanks so much for joining in, Brittney! 😀
    P.S. The words aren’t in the middle of the box on my laptop. Love the stars though. 🙂

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      1. The words start on the left flap, but they end up in the middle! Not too far off… just look like they’re trying to get out. Haha!
        I’ll look forward to your Saturday posts. 😀 I do a Wednesday One-Liner prompt too, if you’re interested. 🙂

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