In the 1907 edition of The Education of Henry Adams, Adams writes: “One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.”
The linguist Anna Wierzbicka quotes Adams to show that “The meaning of the English word friend has changed over the centuries”. In what she calls Anglo societies, “the number of ‘friends’ that a person can be expected to have has increased over time.” To get the old force back, “it is now necessary to use the expression close friend.” That expression, she writes, “is definitely modern.”