Frenemies.

"Actually I soon discovered that a substantial number of names listed in my address book belong in the category of Frenemy, an incredibly useful word that should be in every dictionary, coined by one of my sisters when she was a small child to describe a dull little girl who lived near us," wrote Jessica Mitford in a NYT op-ed in 1977.

My sister and the Frenemy played together constantly, invited each other to tea at least once a week, were inseparable companions, all the time disliking each other heartily.

I wonder whether most of us do not, in fact, spend more time with Frenemies than actual friends or outright enemies? The fringy folk whose proximity, either territorial or work-related, demands the frequent dinner invitation and acceptance of their return hospitality....

But real friends — ah? Who are they? Mostly people, boys and girls whom we knew and laughed with, and loved passionately circa age 20....

But that is not the original usage of the word in print. The columnist Walter Winchell used it in 1953 in the Nevada State Journal — not that Mitford's sister cribbed the coinage — "Howz about calling the Russians our Frienemies?"

I got that from the Oxford English Dictionary, where I looked up the word "frenemy" today after seeing it in The Daily Mail. I was reading "Woman, 62, with cancer survives being trapped in car for EIGHT days without food and only rain water after getting lost and stuck in the mud" when I glanced away over into the sidebar and saw "BFFs again? Kim Kardashian shares a laugh with frenemy Paris Hilton in new Instagram snap/Enjoying a laugh together in Ibiza."

Ah! The Daily Mail! Oh, the decline! Let's cleanse our palate with a quaff of the fresh rain water that was journalism in the 1950s: