Another kind of buddy

[Jonathan Lighter]

My mother frequently used "boyfriend" to refer to a man's male friends, just as she used "girlfriend" to refer to a woman's female friends.

  This later struck me as odd, but I've seen a fair number of printed exx., esp. from ca1915-1930:

  1919 A. C. Witwer _Alex the Great_  [Boston: Small, Maynard & Co.] 14: "I never heard tell of such carryin' on!" "Wait till you been here a little longer," I says, "I ain't carryin' on, me and some boy friends of mine is tryin' to kill a dull afternoon."

  So, Larry, whatcha gonna do?

  In "early" use, "boy friend" was commonly used in the transparent sense of a friend, as of a schoolchild, who was a young boy. Still in use, but on the way out, I'd imagine, and too transparent to be in any dictionary, then or now. Undoubtedly, though, this is the source of the now dominant sense, as millions of kids grew into teen age wanting a word that seemed less formal than "sweetheart" and less old-fashioned (and, considering the era, perhaps less final) than "beau."  This development was underway before World War I.

  In a literal sense:

  1864  "Oliver Optic" _In School and Out_ [N.Y.: A. L. Burt] 166: Lest our boy friends misunderstand us, we must add that the colonel's views are our own.

  1889 Horace E. Scudder _George Washington_  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin] 41: I do not believe he told her what he wrote to one of his boy friends.

  1900 G. A. Henty _Facing Death_  : Bill Cummings, Fred Wood, and several others of Jack's boy friends, were viewers or under-managers of the Vaughan,

  1907 Sophia Lyon Fahs _Uganda's White Man of Work_ [N.Y.: Young People's Missionary movement] 10: Stanley, while still a lad, had told some of his boy friends that when he became a man he was going to be a missionary.

  1910 Belle Moses _Lewis Carroll in Wonderland and at Home_ [N.Y.: D. Appleton] 38: If he had any boy friends, there are no records of their intercourse.

  (Not what you think, you filthy rotter!)

  J "With a Thank You to Live Search Books" L

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: Another kind of buddy
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At 5:25 AM -0500 6/15/07, Paul Johnson wrote:
>My wife's family refers to adult male friends as "boyfriends" "Uncle
>Fred's boyfriend, Peter..." This has always seemed off key to me. Do
>adult heterosexuals have boyfriends?
>
I hope not. I've been citing the asymmetry of "boyfriend" and
"girlfriend" for 30 years in language and gender classes.

LH

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