friend

   ‘Unless there be real affection in his heart’, writes Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The Blithedale Romance, ‘a man cannot more effectually show his contempt for a brother mortal, nor more gallingly assume a position of superiority, than by addressing him as “friend”.’ Support for this view comes from another American writer. ‘Ain’t you got any consideration?’ asks a character in An American Dream, by Norman Mailer. ‘Up your ass, friend,’ is the reply. A policeman uses the term in a similar way in The Late Risers, by Bernard Wolfe. The man addressed is left in no doubt as to the unfriendly feelings of the speaker. ‘My fine friend’ is used sarcastically by one man to another in Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.

   One might compare the use of ‘my honourable friend’ used in parliamentary language, and the legal ‘my learned friend’, though these occur in third person references, not direct address. Some uses of ‘friend’, thankfully, are genuinely friendly. When the dean of a college calls a student ‘my young friend’, in Sinclair Lewis’s Gideon Planish, he means it kindly. The several instances of ‘my friend’ in Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin, and the similar instances in Coldfinger, by Ian Fleming, all show the word being used as one might expect, to someone who is liked by the speaker. But it is perhaps the possible ambiguity of the term that has caused the members of the Society of Friends to be careful about how and when they use it, though it is the normal mode of address to fellow Quakers. Such speakers may also use ‘friend’ instead of a social title, addressing someone as ‘Friend Jones’.

   Examples of such usage occur in Except for Me and Thee, by Jessamyn West. The Society of Friends adopted that title at a time when the word had only positive connotations. It could even be used for a lover, as Juliet demonstrates in Romeo and Juliet, when she addresses Romeo as ‘love, lord, ay, husband, friend’.

   Curiously, ‘friend’ remains a very positive expression on nearly all occasions when it is used in the plural. The ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech from Julius Caesar is probably the best-known Shakespearean example, setting a style for public-speakers ever afterwards. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ says Mr Pickwick, then corrects himself, ‘No, I won’t say ladies and gentlemen, I’ll call you friends, my dear friends, if the ladies will allow me to take so great a liberty…’ The ladies show by their applause that the liberty is allowable, for which of them could doubt that Mr Pickwick had ‘real affection in his heart’. At the other extreme is the nonce name created by a male speaker in Like Any Other Man, by Patrick Boyle: You’re too bloody smart, Mister-my-fucking friend.’