IKEA Effect

People attach greater value to things they have made themselves than if the very same product was produced by someone else. This cognitive bias is known as the IKEA effect.

Creating something yourself boosts people’s feelings of pride and competence, and has the added effect of showing off their competence to others. This can lead to an overly subjective view of a project.

Chandler: [Rips his jacket on the large wooden tv unit.] Wow! That ripped! That ripped real nice!
Joey: How many times I have to tell you! You, turn and slide! You know, turn and slide.
Chandler: Oh you don’t turn and slide, you throw it out! I’m tired of having to get a tetanus shot every time I get dressed!
Joey: Well, we’re not throwing it out! I built this thing with my own hands!
– Friends (1997) Season 4, Episode 2; “The One with the Cat” [No. 75]

On Understanding the World

“Friends, with your help and love you have shown us how to make sense of the world, and when the world hasn’t made any sense at all you told us to sit back and enjoy it; you taught us what’s right, what’s real, what’s beautiful about this planet, and for that we are eternally grateful.”

– Richard Solomon

On Tangled Christmas Lights

“I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas lights.”

– Maya Angelou

Verbal Satiation

Verbal satiation is another term for semantic satiation; it occurs when someone says or reads a word so frequently in a short timespan that it loses its meaning.

Steve: Tartlets… Tartlets… Tartlets… The word has lost all meaning.
– Friends (1995) Season 1, Episode 15; “The One with the Stoned Guy” [No. 15]

Theory [Noun.]

1. (in everyday speech) conjecture.
2. (in science) a hypothesis confirmed by repeated observation or empirical experiment; a coherent statement about an observed phenomenon that has been proved to behave according to one or more principles or laws.

Ross: Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact, like, like, like the air we breathe, like gravity.
Phoebe: Oh, okay, don’t get me started on gravity.
Ross: You uh, you don’t believe in gravity?
Phoebe: Well, it’s not so much that you know, like I don’t believe in it, you know, it’s just…I don’t know, lately I get the feeling that I’m not so much being pulled down as I am being pushed.
[There’s a knock at the door]
Chandler: Uh-Oh. It’s Isaac Newton, and he’s pissed.
– Friends (1995) Season 2, Episode 3; “The One Where Heckles Dies” [No. 27]

Acrimonious [Adj.]

Angry, acid, and sharp in delivering argumentative replies: bitter; mean-spirited; sharp in language or tone.

Joey: Hey, if you wanna grab a bite before work we’d better get acrimonious.
[…]
Ross: Listen, if you don’t know what the word “acrimonious” means, just don’t use it.
– Friends (2003) Season 9, Episode 21; “The One with the Fertility Test” [No. 215]

Friend

What is a friend exactly? After some deliberation, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of the word ‘friend’ is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the word ‘friend’.

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
– Elbert Hubbard

“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
– Aristotle

“To like and dislike the same things, that is indeed true friendship.”
– Catiline‎

“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
– Anaïs Nin

“There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.”
– Linda Grayson

“Friendship is Love without his wings!”
– Lord Byron

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
– C.S. Lewis

See more: Approximations

Shakespeare and False Friends

There are a number of words in Shakespeare’s plays and poems which are deceptive to modern ears. They may seem familiar words but, in fact, camouflage a quite different meaning lost to modern English. In Linguistics, these words are called False Friends.

A False Friend is a word which has kept its form but has strayed from its original sense (or was a completely different word) so that the modern English word is false when compared to the original sense or word. Shakespeare likes to extend the wordplay further by often deliberately using words in their older senses. Consider the following words:

Lover
Modern: someone you are in a sexual relationship with, usually illicitly
Shakespeare: friend

Lover as friend precedes the modern meaning by a little over a century, with both dating back to the Middle English period. Shakespeare, however, punster that he is, uses lover almost exclusively in the old sense. If you do not know what he means, some Shakespearean situations can sound quite awkward, to say the least. Lorenzo, for example, fervently puts a plug in for Antonio to Portia as ‘a lover of my lord your husband’ (The Merchant of Venice, III.iv.7).

Friend
Modern: a person you know well, love and regard
Shakespeare: (primarily) lover

Friend is an Old English word which appears in texts as early as Beowulf; it derives from the Proto-Germanic frijōjanan and is cognate with the verb ‘to free’. It started with the sense we know today, with a slightly extended application to someone we hold in regard or a relative. This generalized sense, too, is encountered in Shakespeare and creates a pun or two. Now that you know what Shakespeare has in mind, you are clued in when Lady Capulet tells Juliet to stop crying, ‘So shall you feel the loss, but not the friend / Which you weep for’, and Juliet replies that she is weeping for her beloved — not the relative, ‘Feeling so the loss, I cannot choose but ever weep the friend’ (Romeo & Juliet, III.v.74-7).