"Boyfriend"

Why do people mangle and distort this word and use it to refer to almost anybody?

A boyfriend is someone (male) whom you are romantically involved with.

A friend who is a boy is NOT a boyfriend…he is a male friend.

An acquaintance had once introduced me to his friends saying, “I’ve always been a good boyfriend to her.”
God-oh-god! When I had felt offended he was taken aback. According to him there had been nothing wrong with his way of talking and I was simply overreacting!!!

A gentleman had once been invited to our college to hone our “soft skills” before the recruitment season.

In the mock interview session this gentleman chose to ask a girl the following question...
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
To which the girl nonchalantly replied, “As a matter of fact I have many.”
The gentleman-“So who/what is a boyfriend?”
The girl- “A male friend. But colloquially we often use the term to denote someone special.”

The gentleman could not have been happier with the answer.

And I could not have been unhappier to witness the painful travesty.

And why did I not object? I had felt it would be disrespectful.

Also they could have argued that they had meant boy friend and not boyfriend since the former term can be used to refer to a male friend. How could I have explained to them how jocular they sound even though their apparently flimsy logic could not exactly be disposed of?

There was a time when people would say, “Repeating a lie a 1000 times doesn’t make it the truth.”

But now if you keep repeating something wrong…sooner or later it probably would be accepted.

Just as "boyfriend" now has a secondary meaning in some dictionaries… “a male friend”.

Do you accept it?

I know I don’t and if any of my friends dare to disagree with me I’m telling you... I will take the ‘r’ away from friend.