the.com/friendly
The setting on a fire that hasn't decided whether to warm you or burn you.
means Kind, warm, and easy to get along with — the opposite of hostile.
from Simply friend plus the suffix -ly, 'in the manner of.' Friend itself traces back through Old English freond to a Germanic root meaning 'to love' — the same root that gives us 'free,' since in old Germanic tribes your freeman kin were, not coincidentally, the ones who loved and protected you. So friendly literally means 'in the manner of one who loves you' — which makes the fire metaphor sharper than it looks: love and warmth were always dangerously close to the same word.
- origin
- from Old English freond, meaning free, as in kin
- linguistic loophole
- can precede fire, which is the opposite
- corporate tell
- often means cheap, polite labor, not warmth
- dog test
- the only species that proves it without words