the true meaning of friendship

No, I'm not going to get all sappy on you here. I am, however, going to share with you how I spent far too much time on google tonight trying to answer a simple question asked innocently by our five year old last night. (And subsequently spent far too much time trying to explain it to you here.)

Gage wanted to know why a "friendship" has to have a "ship" in it..."I mean it's just a friend and a friend...where did the ship come from?" Things that make you go hmmmm. (And make you thankful for the vast expanse of the internet). Maybe.

After stumbling through a few websites (including wikipedia) that simply defined the meaning of friendship as "a term used to denote co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more people" blah, blah, blah... I found this on Bartleby.com:

"The suffix -ship has a long history in English. It goes back to the Old English suffix -scipe, which was attached to adjectives and nouns to indicate a particular state or condition: hardship, friendship. In Modern English the suffix has been added only to nouns and usually indicates a state or condition (authorship, kinship, partnership, relationship), the qualities belonging to a class of human beings (craftsmanship, horsemanship, sportsmanship), or rank or office ."

Upon further research, I confirmed this definition of scipe in an Old English Dictionary:

"scipe [] m (-es/-as) 1. pay, stipend; 2. state, condition, dignity, office; 3. position, rank; 4. ge~ n (-es/-u) fate"

Not sure how you actually translate this to a five year old but at least we no longer suspect that it the word had something to do with the camaraderie found after spending time on a ship. Yes, that was a theory. Not mine. But a theory.