Talk:make friends

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make friends

Pilcrow nominated for deletion on the grounds that it is a bad title and not very useful. Seems okay to me. —Stephen ^(Talk) 05:48, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

• I have expanded the definition (separated transitive and intransitive senses). Keep. SemperBlotto 07:16, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

  I like the senses and usage examples, but don't we restrict "transitive" and "intransitive" to grammatical rather than semantic (in)transitivity? "Make friends" accepts as complement only a prepositional phrase headed by "with". Arguably make friends with is itself an idiom, as AHD (idioms), MWOnline, and RHU agree. Is it US? DCDuring TALK 10:34, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

The with-less usage seems SOP to me; we say "make a friend", "make a new friend", "make a bunch of new friends", and so on, and this is just one instance of that. It should be documented at [[friend]]. The with-ful usage is trickier; semantically it doesn't have anything that's not implied in "make friends" (SOP) + "friends with" (cf. "become friends with", "be friends with"), but I don't totally understand the grammar. Create [[friends with]], weak create [[make friends with]], weak delete or redirect [[make friends]]. —Ruakh_TALK 14:41, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

From a quick search via gbooks, make friends used bare may predate use with prepositions (unto, of, with). "Riches may make friends many ways" appears in a 16thC proverb collection by John Heywood. — Pingku^dimmi 14:54, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

McGraw-Hill and AHD Idioms and WordNet have make friends. [[make friends]] could be a redirect to [[make friends]]. I'm not sure that a "with"-headed PP is really a complement rather than an adjunct, though it is by far the most common PP head after "make friends". DCDuring TALK 15:12, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Actually, a "with"-headed PP is a complement of "friends", as in "I have been friends with her since childhood.". This argues for not having make friends with and making sure that we have the complementation at [[friends]] (not [[friend]] !). I have added usage examples at friends. Does it need a sense? If so, I cannot think of wording. DCDuring TALK 16:26, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Whatever you decide, don't delete both make friends and make friends with. --Hekaheka 11:20, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

• Current configuration of entries with my best efforts:
  1. New sense at [[friends]]. (which seems to me distinct from simple plural by strongly implying a two-way liking relationship).
  2. Redirect from [[friends with]] to [[friends]].
  3. Entry at [[make friends]]
  4. Redirect from [[make friends with]] to [[make friends]].

-- Review welcomed. DCDuring TALK 13:29, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

· I don't think that the sense that you added to [[friends]] is idiomatic, or at all different from the simple plural of friend. The two-way liking relationship can be just as strongly implied using the singular; if person A addresses person B as friend, or describes or refers to person B as his friend, then person B might object by saying, "I'm not your friend! I don't even like you!"; and if person C asks person B, "who's your friend?", then person B might object by saying, "He's not my friend! I don't even like him!" The grammatical roles are reversed, but the meaning is unchanged.
· I do think there's an idiomatic sense of friends: the sense that can be used with either a singular or a plural predicand, as in "I became friends with him in college" or "we became friends with them in college". (Your fourth example sentence exemplifies this sense, but it's not ideal: we really need examples with singular predicands, IMHO, for it to be clear why it's idiomatic.)
· Also, both of your examples that use "make friends", use it to mean "make friends with each other". I wasn't sure about that, and [[make friends]] implies that it doesn't exist, but it seemed plausible (since "we're friends" can mean "we're friends with each other"), so I searched Google Books. It does seem to exist, but it's quite rare compared to other uses; "we made friends right away", for example, does not get nearly as many hits as "I made friends right away", and even of the hits it does get, about a third mean "we immediately formed friendships with other people", not "we immediately formed a friendship with each other". So while I think we should edit [[make friends]] to indicate that this usage exists, I think it's too atypical to be a good choice for example sentences in other entries. I dunno.
—Ruakh_TALK 23:03, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

kept -- Liliana • 19:43, 20 November 2011 (UTC)