Coconuts

Jan 14, 2026 | By Joseph Yu BF ‘28

When was the last time you uttered the word “friend”? I can guarantee it was at some point today. “Oh, he’s a friend from class,” you might’ve said, when in reality you’ve only met twice. “I’ve got a friend who works there — she can help,” when you’ve only connected on LinkedIn and have never met in person. Or someone might’ve told you, “Let’s be friends,” a fragile compromise suggesting the two of you can barely tolerate each other.

We hardly notice just how common the word is in American vernacular. SpongeBob’s cheerful “F is for friends who do stuff together…” may be one of the earliest lessons we absorbed from TV. You might’ve grown up watching The 90’s Sitcom on repeat—Friends. “Be friends with each other!”, schools teach children before they can even pronounce the word “friend” properly. Given just how abundant and versatile “friend” has become in our society, the word has lost its meaning. Whenever I hear someone saying, “they’re a friend,” a flurry of questions storms my mind—What “level” of friend are they? Can I trust them? Do they have my best interests at heart? Referring to someone as a friend nowadays conveys almost zero information. But what if a friend still meant something?

The reason for this definitional collapse is that our American vocabulary has lost a crucial word, which “friend” now expands to fill. I was recently discussing this idea with my professor, who completed his PhD in Scotland. Across the pond, Europeans still distinguish between an acquaintance and a friend. For them, “acquaintance” is not just a fancy word to sing at New Year’s Eve, but its inclusion in Scots [1] songs like Auld Lang Syne reflects the truth that acquaintances are real, everyday phenomena.

This distinction allows Europeans to reserve the label of a friend, along with its associated characteristics, loves, and cares, for someone who is truly a friend.

A recent Yale Daily News [2] post titled “On friendships at Yale” highlights how the closest friends seemingly do the most spontaneous and frivolous activities (to borrow the words of Rhaina Cohen [3], “Wasting time together makes the best memories.”) But the inverse is not necessarily true. Does doing spontaneous and frivolous activities automatically make you friends? If you can have “a group of friends [to] party with, a group [to] study with, and another group [to] run with,” that’s eroding any semblance of a definition we had for “friend.” May I suggest, what these groups are really composed of is acquaintances.

The truth is, most people will remain mere acquaintances. This model requires us to be more hesitant to call someone our friend, but when we do, we will usually be friends for life. The paradox is, we never really know if someone is an acquaintance or a friend until time and distance endeavor to wedge us apart. Only when we meet again will we discover whether the elapsed years protrude invisibly yet uncomfortably, or if they’ve completely smoothed away. Either we will say, “That was a time”—a completed past that we can only look on with nostalgia, or we will realize “That time” continues right now in our midst. Those with whom we have the latter are true friends.

Societies with these types of friendships have a name—coconut cultures. People’s outer shells may take patience to pierce. You might knock several times and only hear the hollow reverberations of indifference. But once you’ve gotten past their initial front, you’re greeted with the softest of welcomes on the inside. Language itself models the coconut. Bekannter is the preferred German word for “someone I know,” whereas using Freud comes with many more prerequisites. The Slavic languages of Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian all share the concept of znajomy for someone who “one knows.” My Spanish roommate keeps up with the lives of many colegas (colleagues/classmates) on Instagram, but his amigos are the ones he regularly calls.

Contrast this with “peach” cultures like America’s, which become so ripe that biting into their invitations is near irresistible. The fruitful joys of “friendship” greet you immediately, but soon you reach the hard, stubborn core. If you’ve ever tried gnawing through a peach core (I’m not sure why, if you have), you’ll know that it’s near impossible. The core is an amalgam of emotional debris we carry, disappointments that taught us to protect ourselves, and betrayals that made us cautious. In America, we’re suspicious of those who attempt to draw close to us. Once the sweetness of the peach is spent, the focus flips from outward to inward. We begin asking, “Why do they want to be friends with me? What do they see in me that will be useful for them—can I bear being their continual supplier of this? What’s risky here for me?” The peach core is in the business of removing friends (who may actually have just been really good acquaintances), not making them.

It’s no wonder then that our peach society is inundated with self-help literature on how to trust our friends, how to cut out toxic friendships, How to Win Friends and Influence People—the list goes on and on. We talk so much about friends, but at the same time, we (with irony we can no longer discern the authenticity of) complain about having “no friends [4].” How did this happen? Most people in the world aren’t thinking about friendships like Americans do—they have bigger cares to be concerned about. But when they do enter into conversations about friendship, they’re often far less complicated because the word “friend” still means something to them. So what’s the difference between someone “known” (as most words for acquaintance translate to) and a friend? A friend is someone loved.

Amigo comes from the Latin amicus, meaning friend, which derives from amare, the Latin verb for “to love.” Even in English, the predecessor frēond means “one who loves.” When we cast our spurious uses of “friend” out into the world today, can we truthfully say that we love all these people? We can try all we want, but we will fall short [5]. Real love cannot thrive at the surface of our interactions. It sits deeper, past the shell of societally-mandated politeness. Here, love preserves the bond between two friends even as they might change, grow, and become entirely new people. Love shields the inner fruit of a coconut to preserve it long after the flesh of a corresponding peach would have completely rotted away. “That was a time,” we say, when we reconnect with an acquaintance after years apart, and all that remains is a brittle peach core. But “That time still lives,” we say, when we find a friend decades later and the fruit is still sweet.

Bringing back the “acquaintance” may still seem like a rude idea. Why should we treat certain people in our lives as second-class citizens just because we don’t know them well? After all, everyone has the potential to be our friend. But herein lies the two-fold problem. Firstly, knowledge is not the criterion for friendship. Knowing someone better will only render them a better acquaintance if we forever lack the love to call them a friend. And secondly, the reality of this divide does not care for our acknowledgement. Only when we do ascribe words to the difference, we begin to appreciate one in light of the other. Philosophers who otherwise vary greatly agree on this point—to ascertain the value of “friendship” in terms of what it is not [6]. What we have in America today is a monolithic understanding of “friendship” that is total and unchanging [7]. Everyone in the vicinity of our lives is under the same label of “friend,” which we have no frame of reference to compare to.

Today, we have too many peach pits to count and too few pitchers of coconut elixir to quench our thirst in times of loneliness. Let us intentionally invest in the latter, rather than surrendering ourselves to the whims of the shifting social sandboxes we stand in. Only then will friendships emerge, rooted in what friends were originally meant to be—a love that endures even as we both drift our separate ways. Friendships that offer sweetness when the surrounding world feels dry. Friendships that pour selfless streams without ever striking the hesitations of a peach core. We will not find these friendships every day, month, or even year. These coconuts will barely match the pace at which we consume our peaches. But the springs of water welling up within will be well worth the wait. The next time you say “friend,” think of it differently. Think of a coconut.

[1] Scholars debate whether Scots is a dialect of Modern English or a completely separate language: R. I. C. Financial Analysts Journal, vol. 42, no. 5, 1986, pp. 80–80. JSTOR.

[2] Vasquez-Fernandez, Esmeralda. “On Friendships at Yale.” Yale Daily News, 8 Nov. 2025.

[3]Cohen, Rhaina. “What Adults Forget about Friendship.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 11 Feb. 2025.

[4] In 2021, 12% of Americans reported having no friends, an increase from less than 3% in the 1990s. Cox, Daniel A. “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss - the Survey Center on American Life.” The Survey Center on American Life, 10 Mar. 2025.

[5] It is sociologically impossible to “love everyone.” Robin Dunbar theorized that humans can only handle up to about 150 relationships. Patrik Lindenfors, Andreas Wartel, Johan Lind; ‘Dunbar's number’ deconstructed. Biol Lett 1 May 2021; 17 (5): 20210158.

[6] Hegel’s theory of dialectics and Derrida’s of deconstruction have opposing views on truth (the dialectic arrives at truth while deconstruction argues there is none), but unite on an apophatic method of “understanding.”

[7] The idea of a singular, static, and eternal substance comprising and being synonymous with the world stems from the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides.