this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
1350 points (98.8% liked)
Privacy
8213 readers
166 users here now
A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy
Rules:
- Be civil
- No spam posting
- Keep posts on-topic
- No trolling
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As hetero women we will often refer to friends who are girls as girlfriends. You could be right, but the 7 here is what I just described.
English is weird with that. Other languages have a separate word for friend and for partner
English doesn't even have a word for person who you are engaged to be married to. Luckily French had two, so they shared.
I mean, English is just a collection of loanwords pasted haphazardly onto a bastardization skeleton of Germanic and romance languages.
Not German. But it's usually differentiated by the use of possessive or no possessive.
Mein Freundin = Partner
Eine Freundin = Friend
English is usually the same though.
My girlfriend = Partner
One of my girlfriends / a girlfriend = Friend