FRIEND, n. Fiend, misspelled and misinterpreted, usually until well after it is too late.
FRIENDSHIP: toxic contract in which it is agreed that one or more existential but personally inconvenient facts are to be ignored, nay actively denied, for the sake of a chancy companionship of dubious value and even more dubious longevity. See RELIGION. FAMILY: in which the toxic contract is inherited instead of being subjected to, voluntarily or otherwise, sometime after birth.
IGNORANCE: your refusal to ignore and deny existential facts in the manner agreed among my friends, thereby allowing me to classify you as a fiend and treat you accordingly.
In the ancient history of the English language (it says here), friend and fiend were considered to be opposites (“antonyms“, to use the $50 word). By the late 13th century CE, the word fiend had been sent to the Devil, and replaced by the word enemy, which had been stolen from France.
This might have been done to lessen confusion and reduce the number and severity of unfortunate incidents. Similarly, among sailors, the word larboard was replaced by the word port, lest people misunderstand commands and rush to the wrong side of the boat, with sad consequences.
It didn’t help.
The Dudes, with their abject failure of a literary agent, O Ceallaigh (aka OC and The Amoeba), first descended onto the blogosphere from a rented room in Berkeley, California on New Year’s Day in 2006. They’ve moved from California to Maine to Washington to Hawaiʻi to Washington again to Hawaiʻi again (where they’ve finally managed to stay put, for now anyway), picking up a Quilly along the way. They’ve stayed on the blogosphere (on four different sites, two of which have since vanished), while the thing that was the blogosphere in 2006 moved to Facebook to Youtube to Twitter to Instagram to Tiktok. And a lot of, um, stuff has gone down. O Ceallaigh thought it might amuse someone out there to see just what kind of stuff has gone down over the last fifteen years, and how it looked at the time to OC and the Dudes and their gaggle of weird buddies.
