ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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The word "intercourse" had that meaning (not just in the sexual sense) back then.
My guess is that relationships existed for many centuries before the word was first recorded....just a hunch
Going to the Germanic side of English, you have the word "bond". The Online Etymological Dictionary says that's connected to the word "band", which can be traced all the way to the Gothic (the oldest written Germanic language, 4th Century AD)"bandwa": "a sign". Apparently a band of cloth worn by soldiers for identification. I think "bond" is the old-fashioned synonym you couldn't find.
Synonyms from bygone times: liaison, affair, and, long ago indeed, romance.
Bryan is partly right, "relationships" were often denoted by more specific words.
I do think that "friend" is the closest synonynm from the 1600s and 1700s. Numerous quotes from Shakespeare and the Bible show a wide variety of meaning, from "patron" to "acquaintence" to "disciple" to "bosom buddy".
By considering the word "intercourse" in its older usage we see that the need for the word was limited to very abstract, highly distanced discussions. The relationships that "mattered" were more circumscribed and precise. There was no need to have a word that would encompass all of friendship, marriage, acquaintanceship, business familiarity, hierarchy, kinship and other familial interactions in the same term.
I also suspect the popularity of "relationship" was due to the pop-psychology scientistism that sought to divorce love, marriage, sex, affairs, and other romantic entanglements from their traditional connotations and make them an object of "neutral" discourse. The other terms were loaded with the baggage of traditional judgment and creating a new term became a SWPL way of signalling your modernity and neutrality. In some cases it became easier to create a moral equivalence between (for example) marriage and homosexual coupling or between platonic friendships and affairs.
It's interesting how euphemisms decay over time. "Intercourse" is used, with a straight face, in the scientific literature.
I still snicker on the inside when people say "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" because they're too squeamish to say "lover."
It seems like possibly there's a trend. I note a lot of people nowadays don't like to put labels on their relationships--are they a couple, et c. I wonder if people have a greater need to keep their options open. Getting tied down nowadays seems more costly than it did int he past, since opportunity costs are so great now compared to then!
O'Brian's Master And Commander (set around 1800) uses "particular friend".