Talk:make friends

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. — Pingkudimmi 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:
 * New sense at [[friends]]. (which seems to me distinct from simple plural by strongly implying a two-way liking relationship).
 * Redirect from [[friends with]] to [[friends]].
 * Entry at [[make friends]]
 * Redirect from [[make friends with]] to [[make friends]].
 * -- Review welcomed. DCDuring TALK 13:29, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

· 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;, for example, does not get nearly as many hits as , 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)
 * · 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.

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