I didn't find the categorization of friendships offered by the article all that useful. It seems far too simplistic and superficial to be the state-of-the-art i

I didn't find the categorization of friendships offered by the article all that useful. It seems far too simplistic and superficial to be the state-of-the-art in sociology: terms like trust, confidence, outgroup, ingroup seem curiously absent. But I could easily be wrong about that, as I don't know much about sociology in the first place. But I do know a few things about linguistics, and I'm well aware that the oldest meaning of friend wasn't "ally" in Rome. Amicus means "loved one", and its application to allies is a mere Lakoffian metaphor, and by no means, as claimed by the article, the origin of the concept. While recognizing the author's expertise in sociology, when I take into account Gell-Mann amnesia, I was much less able to take his explanations seriously after that introduction. The writing style didn't help either: it imitates that genre of 2010s SAT essays where the student has to demonstrate familiarity with the Western canon by strenously relating random events in books they read to inane questions such as "Are people defined by their occupations?"