Nick Enfield

Tolerable friends

A language learner encounters a word, and taking it to be cognate with a known word in their own language, presumes the new word to mean the same as the old. Sometimes this sense of security is false—when, for instance, an American in Paris asks in his broken French whether there are any préservatifs in his yoghurt—hence the term false friend. False friends trick us because we so readily take surface form to indicate probable meaning. Luckily as second language learners we often become immediately aware of our error thanks to native speakers’ unexpected reactions or even overt correction. But sometimes, despite natives recognizing that we have used a word in a non-native way, we get no feedback of any inaptness. They know what we mean, and we get what we want yet without standing corrected. And perhaps even more often, although a speaker and hearer have different concepts of what a word means, this difference never surfaces. The word’s communicative effect is compatible with more than one version of its meaning. This is not a false friend, but a tolerable friend. With a tolerable friend, you might not quite have the meaning right, but you never realize it. And it never makes a difference. Like the false friend, appearances deceive, but this deception never actually matters.