"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 08/02/18 (friend, definite, free, fiend, frenemy)

I was talking recently about how tricky English is in terms of its sprlling. And there are sometimes tips to help you remember. So, definite, if you remember two Is because it's linked to finire, the Latin, meaning to finish. So definite is linked to finish, and that way you might remember the two Is. And one way to remember friend, which is another really commonly misspelled word, is to think about fiend, the I-E, because, believe it or not, friend and fiend derive from pretty much the same root and they have grown in parallel courses, if you like, over the course of English. So although, they developed independently from two different Germanic words, they were once very much seen as paired opposites, and alliteratively paired opposites as well, if you like. So to take friend first, that entered old English as freond. And that from a Germanic verb brought by all the Germanic invading tribes, which was freon, meaning to love. And believe it or not, freon is also behind free. Free, once meaning belived or dear. And we think it's because members of a household united by blood or by kinship were seen as not only were they dear to each other, but they as free, as opposite to the slaves that they hired to wait upon them. And over time that meaning changed. Free and friend and to love. So friends in those days meant exactly the same as it does today. So a person other than a lover or a relative who you hold in affection. Fiend goes back to another Germanic word and that was feond. So it wasn't freond, it was feond. So just the R was missing. Meaning to hate. And it was used very much in the form of an enemy. So a feond was somebody who was your arch-rival, if you like. In time it came not to mean your personal arch-rival but a rival to humankind itself, in fact to the very devil, and it is from that idea that fiend took on the idea of Satsn incarnate, if you like. Or to anybody who had evil intent. Foe took the place, if you like, of fiend in that sense. It was friend or foe, rather than friend or fiend, but those were the two exact opposites in the olden days. Eventually fiend was applied to somebody a little bit devilish, if you like, or had some sort of uncommon craving, like a fiend for chocolate, for example. If you don't know whether somebody is your friend or fiend, then you can call them frenemy. Frenemy being a modern blend of friend and enemy. But that idea of two polar opposites has been around for a while. In Samuel Johnson's dictionary talks about a backfriend. A backfriend is pretty much the same as a frenemy. So he called it "a friend backwards, that is, an enemy in secret".