Definitions

Aishi and I were talking about close friends, and we realized we had different semantics attached to the term. Aishi and I talk maybe four times a year. Once a season. When we talk, it's usually for upwards for six hours at a time. We always have trouble tearing ourselves away.



Curiously, Aishi doesn't think of me as one of her closest friends, because this is her definition of close:



Closeness is a feeling of home, stability, continual presence, dependability that they'll be there.

Which our pattern of interaction tends not to allow for.



I think my definition is more like:



Closeness is the ability for me to connect instantly and seamlessly with another person, regardless of how frequently we see each other or how long we've known each other.

Which she easily satisfies.



I don't know what the GRE definition [1] of closeness is. I think it might be closer to Aishi's definition than mine.



Incidentally, this is related to the concept of word icebergs [2]. Another friend and I ran into this curious case where we were talking about tech products -- Reddit and Twitter in this case -- and we had very different associations with each. This made talking about concepts in relation to them really tough.



In competitive debate, which I did voraciously in high school, you always start the debate by laying out the ground definitions. I guess this is why!



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[1] My "close" friends and I use the term GRE definition to convey "the modal meaning or answer a random sample of a lot of people would converge on." So, the GRE answer to "What do you think of Canada?" is "It's cold AF."



[2] Word icebergs is a term describing the fact that everyone has slightly different semantic associations with every word that exists. The word is the tip of the iceberg, and the meanings I associate with the word make up the rest of the iceberg.