Let's Be Friends

From StoneHome

Few tired old horses of the literary trade carry as much familiarity as "let's be friends," an archetypal way to break up with a lover from which dozens of other excuses stem. It's also crap.

Where Friend Comes From

Friend, from the Old High English freond, the present participle of proto-German's frijojanan "to love" almost certainly by way of Old Norse's frændi via Old Frisian's friund or Gothic frijonds.

Freond is a funny word: it's a parallel to both freo in Old English and to proto-Germanic's frijaz (as frijojanan,) "free, unbonded, exempt from ownership" - that is, what an American colonist or Roman might have called a citizen, or what Feudalists called landed commoners. This is as contrast to the derivations from Latin's liberi, what we now call released, mitigated or liberated slaves, what an American colonist might have called a freeman or a Roman an unbonded serf. To wit, liberated is in fact a direct descendant from liberi.

Liberi and Frijaz

In fact, liberi and frijaz mean almost the same thing: someone which isn't a serf. The specific difference can be traced back through frijaz to Proto Indo-European to prijos, "dear, beloved" to the Sanskrit priyah "dear, beloved, one's own." The specific difference between liberi "freed slave" and frijaz "beloved" has nothing to do with their enslavement at all. Rather, priyah were people which were beloved; in context, people which were part of "the family": people which were acceptable as the targets of relationships and marriage. Liberi, by contrast, were not. This is rather similar in many ways to a caste structure, or American Northern racism in the late 1960s: oh sure, you can walk the streets, have a productive job, even your own home, but as a liberi you can't screw my daughter. Only prijah - friends - are allowed to do that.

Descendants

This is reflected much more strongly outside of English in nearly every European language derived even partially from the Germanics, mostly stemming up through Old High German's frija or Middle High German's vri, but also through the Old High English neé Ostragothic freis/freogan and the Old Norse friðr. From this root come the German, Welsh, Dutch, Norse, Danish and Saxon words for love, peace, wife, to woo, and a word missing from English which is to give freely (as in an act of generosity.) Probably the clearest examples are freo→freod→friðr→frigga (Odin's wife, the carrier of the hearth, the basis of love, fealty, and the woman's right to leave) and frijon→vrijon→vrien (to wed)→freien (to woo.)

Upshot

So in fact, the very definition of a friend is that sex and a relationship with them is socially or religiously acceptable. Benefits are the default for friendship by denotation. Or, more clearly, friends are people you're supposed to fuck.

Maybe the most amusing bit about this is that the politically correct way to refer to socially promiscuous individuals of late has been to call them liberated; it seems that we've switched the two words in common usage. Yay for ignorance.