In France, if you use "ami" ("friend"), it implies intimacy. What americans call friends are what we call "potes", which are "buddies".
The word "friend" is tossed around so easily in the US culture. "This is my very good friend Eric" can mean you know him from work.
But it hasn't always been like that, "friend" use to mean something more. I feel like it's not specific to "friend", but a general growing trend in America to use superlatives for everything. Like "I ate the most amazing fries yesterday".
This removes all meaning, all nuances, from the language. But it does a lot of virtue signaling and sells better.
And it makes sense, because Frenchmen are terrible sellers, and Americans are good ones.
Unfortunately it also mean I now have an automatic filter pass on American speech to tone it down.
> The word "friend" is tossed around so easily in the US culture. "This is my very good friend Eric" can mean you know him from work.
I really hate this as well. It's like people have forgotten that "acquaintances" and "friends" are two different things, and just use "friend" to cover both.
It's not just the word friend, but also the word love.
One my favorite intro's to a movie was Up. The amazing part is how deeply it communicated emotions without using any words.
Talk is cheap, characters in movies and shows will start saying they love each other after having met a week or two before. That's an L word, but it aint love.
The word "friend" is tossed around so easily in the US culture. "This is my very good friend Eric" can mean you know him from work.
But it hasn't always been like that, "friend" use to mean something more. I feel like it's not specific to "friend", but a general growing trend in America to use superlatives for everything. Like "I ate the most amazing fries yesterday".
This removes all meaning, all nuances, from the language. But it does a lot of virtue signaling and sells better.
And it makes sense, because Frenchmen are terrible sellers, and Americans are good ones.
Unfortunately it also mean I now have an automatic filter pass on American speech to tone it down.