As the word “friend” becomes increasingly polluted with imprecision—it’s all kinds of new nouns now, such as “Facebook friend”, and verbs, such as “friending” (whatever happened to befriending, anyway?)—I find it more and more important to unpack this word, break it open into its constituent parts, so we can once again gain confidence that the words we use with one another convey the same concept in our respective minds.

I want to break this word, “friend,” because it has become a useless word insofar as it remains an ideological monolith. Smash it into tiny bits. Then I can start putting the pieces back together again and maybe, finally, understand how they work. I feel like a little boy with his father’s wristwatch, except I’m not a little boy, I’m a lonely man, and I’m not trying to understand a wristwatch, I’m trying to understand the togetherness of human relationships.

The word “friend” is an obstacle in this pursuit. But it is nevertheless something I want. I really, really want a friend. Not a “friend,” but a friend. Not what that word has come to mean in our language, but the piece of my personal community that a person who I could call a friend if that word had any meaning at all would fill in my life.

If I were trying to understand a wristwatch, I would be a mechanic. But I am trying to understand human relationships as a speaker of a language, English, that does not even know it suffers from a dearth of words to describe human relationships, so instead I am a writer.

Yámana is a language of finesse and subtlety. It has sixty-one words for kin, compared to twenty-five in English. Guratuku means to marry someone selfishly or with impure intent; taisasia is to be covered up on the ground like eggs in a nest; porapola was a freshwater seaweed but also referred to striped bears; mamihlapinatapai indicates that two people are looking at each other, hoping the other will do something they want but that neither wants to do; ondagumakona means to pick mussels off clusters one by one from a boat, and cook and eat them at the same time; the word for depression was a crab molting its shell; yámana itself means highest form of life, living, to be alive.

[…]

Of the hundreds of tribes and cultures in the Americas, the Yámana were one of the more primitive. They were Neolithic, had no written language, and could be petty thieves with little regard for private property or personal boundaries. Yet what do we make of a tribe that used metaphor to describe mental disease, skeletons, and the passage of time?

—Blessed Unrest, by Paul Hawken

Language is a superpower. It turns the impossible into the possible. Without the ability to describe an idea, that idea does not exist. But the impetus of that idea does exist. It affects any entity sensitive enough to the idea, calling on that entity in an as-yet-indescribable way to realize the idea, to manifest it through sheer force of imagination. It pulls and pulls that entity toward behaviors and thoughts and feelings. And that pull? We call that “drive” or “purpose,” but these, too, are words so tragically diluted they can not adequately describe the inexplicable total consumption such an influence has.

My loneliness is a feeling of inexplicable total consumption, like that; perhaps it is a feeling that exists for the purpose of bringing into the world a finer, more nuanced understanding of human relationships. Because if we already had that, if we already had words for “the person who I call when I’m feeling down and want a shoulder to cry on,” or “the person whose presence I enjoy being in while at the same time not feeling guilty for not interacting with directly,” or “the person who knows how to make me laugh even when I don’t want to smile,” maybe if we had words for relationships like that, maybe then I’d know how to make friends.

(via All the lonely people - Roger Ebert’s Journal)