The things we say! (2) - 'Mary makes friends again with her mother

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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30 April

Assurance: No mention of that work from whose title - almost certainly alone - we know that it is, in part, about influence on others*!


Josef was very good at making friends, but fell down in keeping them


Odd, then, that the English language seems to suggest that we keep a friend in the same way that we keep:

* Someone's seat on a busy train

* A pet

* A tidy ship - or a good cellar***

* At our personal trainer's exhausting regime

* Someone sweet, happy, etc.

* Up a subscription to Punch (having 'taken it out')

* A friend waiting, because of traffic

* On making the same mistakes, keeping on, or even trucking

* On ad nauseam, etc., etc.



In other words, possibly quite a very much longer list of cognate uses of the verb to keep, some at least of which, I would say, are present to our minds when, as Michaela (and as people do), we make the proposal to Josetta Let's keep a house of ill-repute!


I'd also say that all the connotations, not only of to make, but also of to keep, are 'with us' when we proffer the olive-branch (the gesture made to Noah?).


And so, I suggest, when Mary says to Mother Let's (make it up and) be friends again, the possibility both of reforging that relationship, and of seeking to sustain that link (which might break again), and there all at once, along with tinges of

* Compulsion : I'll make you regret that

* Influence : He made her cry last night

* Creation : John made a lovely cake!


Need I provide the others?



End-notes

* Though I shall comment: (a) consider the word of Italian origin influenza from which we derive flu**, and (b) the usages of the phrase under the influence, which maybe relate the worlds of hypnosis, and of drugs and alcohol.

** Those who write flu' are clearly deluded, and probably spend too long not on the phone, but on the 'phone.

*** What Thurber, very amusingly, talks about (in quotation of a one-time teacher of his) as container for the thing contained, in describing the figure of speech called metonymy, where the wine (bottles) contained in the cellar are referred to by the container, i.e. the cellar, or, in This is a very good bottle!, the bottle, when meaning the wine.


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