Freunde und Bekannte

I've been meaning to write about this for a while. It's become nearly a theme of meditation. 

There is a problem with English. In fact, there are many problems with English, the 1000-year old bastard of Anglo Saxon German and Norman French, as it evolves recklessly and without a great deal of nuance. In order to get to the point, nuance must suffer and a great many new precise words must be invented while the archaic ones remain on the dusty shelf of language giving English more vocabulary than say, French or Spanish, but often it takes much less words to say something in English than in any pure Romance language. English evolved in order to get more quickly to the point, and in that spirit, so will I.

In this era of social networking, it is surprising that people have taken to the term "friend" so easily. Sort of reminds me of how the term "peng you" was so loosely bandied about when I was learning Chinese in Beijing in 1997, as in the phrase "Meiguo he Zhongguo shi pengyou" (America and China are friends) which seemed more like a euphemism for their particular relationship. Am delighted to discover that the Chinese do manage to differentiate and call an online friend "wang you". 

Why didn't our contemporary English inherit the "freunde" versus "bekannte" concept from German? The terms even exist, friend and acquaintance, so why don't we use them? Does acquaintance sound demeaning or offensive? Does friend seem too exclusive? My objection stems from personal use. Many of the people who are my Facebook friends I haven't seen in ages and some of them, (more than I'd like to admit), I have actually never met. Going further into the concentric circles of intimacy, there are people who I see quite often and who I still don't consider my friends. The German definitions of these terms seems to clarify this, at least, as told to me by a German person: 

"Bekannte are the people you meet, your colleagues, classmates, online contacts, etc. Freunde are usually only one or two people, generally ones that you grew up with and that have known you all your life. Those are your friends and those don't change."

As for me, the definition is already off limits because almost no one that knew me all my life is still in my life (besides my family but they don't need to make any great effort to do so; Paris is a nice place any time of year). Over the test of time and my life of constant travel, moving and upheaval, I've discovered that many people who I thought were my friends are, in fact, not. A person who was very dear to me (and has now moved on to other worlds) said: 

"Your true friends you can count with the fingers on one hand. And you don't even need all five fingers to count them." 

I am not putting limits on my feelings but I am slowly removing the poison of flattery and interest that has made me build up my expectations only in order to suffer terribly from them. My friends, they know who they are. The rest, I am happy to be acquainted with.