With Frenemies Like These...

Learned Vol. 6, Issue 24

Classes started last week.

One student, we’ll call him Kenji although that’s not his name, walks into my classroom and straight away says, "We can sit anywhere, right?"

"I'd prefer you kept the same seat as last semester."

"But if we really need to change seats, we can?"

"I suppose if you really don't like your friends anymore and they have become your mortal enemies, then it's okay."

"No, no, nothing like that!"

"Ah. You need to move seats to keep an eye on your enemies."

At this point, Kenji points at me and nods. “I have many enemies in this class.”

“I get it. Keep your friends close and your frenemies closer.”

For a second, I thought I had gone too far and lost the bit. But Kenji rallied. He nodded as sagely as a nineteen-year-old can and said, “I have many frenemies in this class.”

So, frenemy.

I know they’re rivals, but I much prefer to think of them as the best of frenemies. Original photo by Nik A. on Unsplash

Japanese doesn’t have a good word for frenemy, instead it borrows our English one and is becoming steadily more well known thanks to Twitter¹ and Tik Tok, etc. Which is more or less where it achieved permanence in the English-speaking world as well, having been re-coined in the late 90s or early 2000s by the first generation of net users.

Its actual, official coinage has been pushed back a century or so from where we first thought it was. Wikipedia (not the most robust research source, I know) links to a 1953 Walter Winchell column in which he asks, "How About Calling the Russians Our Frienemies?" However, the Oxford English Dictionary says frenemy's first known use was back in 1891, in a newspaper from Norton, Kansas.

And, although frienemy was certainly used in exactly the same way we use frenemy today, neither Google's Ngram Viewer nor the Corpus of Historical American English have usages dating back that far. Instead, we see a clear uptick around the year 2001 and then a steady increase leading to the present.

Importantly, you'll note that so far our two disparate sources keep the "I" from friends, whereas I think most of us would drop it in favor of the more normalized frenemy, but the exact timing of that switch is a little more difficult to pin down. Suffice to say that in the modern NOW corpus - which includes over 18 billion words - frenemy (no i) has a frequency score of 2446 while frienemy (i included) has a mere 37². But I'm digressing. Let's reel it back in a bit.

Frenemy, according to Merriam-Webster is:

a person who is or pretends to be a friend but who is also in some ways an enemy or rival

Okay, true enough. But, rival. What does rival actually mean? Is rival truly a good synonym for enemy? Like, were Holmes and Moriarty rivals? Or is it more professional, like Tesla and Edison? Or is it actually friendly sometimes, like Schwarzenegger and Stallone³? Merriam-Webster again:

1a: one of two or more striving to reach or obtain something that only one can possess

b: one striving for competitive advantage

2obsolete : COMPANION, ASSOCIATE

3: EQUAL, PEER

There are a couple of things here: in definition 1a, the specification that "only one can possess" whatever it is that everyone is striving for introduces an element of competition that I suppose I knew but had never isolated before. Second, definition 3, the synonyms of equal and peer are really interesting because I don't necessarily associate either of those words with competition. Which is to say equals and peers can be competitive but it is not an inherent nuance to either of those words.

MidJourney’s take on frenemy makes me think that the bot needs counseling.

Now, obviously, we tend to pair rival with a descriptive adjective to convey these disparate points: friendly rivalry, professional rivalry, muscle-bound rivalry. Okay, I made that last one up, but you get the idea.

Rival, to me, has a formality to it that frenemy lacks. I'm a middle-aged teacher. I don't really have frenemies. I don't have the time for them. Rivals, on the other hand, I have a few. They're professional and not friendly and they're not something I give a lot of thought to until it comes time to try to get a new paper published and then I think about them a lot. But frenemies? Nah.

By the way, just to wrap this all up somehow, in Japanese rival and enemy are the same word. When I suggested that Japanese could use a new word, tomo-teki from friend and enemy, my students looked at me the way you might look at a dog that has attempted to stand on its hind feet only to fall over in the most ungainly and ungracious of somersaults: pityingly.

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The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection

by Arthur Conan Doyle

I’m not sure Holmes and Moriarty were actually frenemies. As much as they needed each other, there was never any actual friendliness in their relationship. Adversaries is a much more apt word. But, all that aside, the Holmes stories stand up well; they’re a testament to how powerful stories can be and reading the originals shows why we keep returning to them over and over and in so many variations. If you’ve never read them before, do yourself a favor. It’s absolutely worth it, I promise.

1. Or whatever the hell it’s called by the time you read this.

2. Frequency scores are not an absolute unit of measurement, but they are a quick and easy way of assessing which words might be more popular than others.

3. I'm aware that in the 80s, it was not so friendly, these days though?