Isn't bonding the same as being?

I just finished scanning down through one of those subscription e-mails that magazines send out. You know the kind, where it's an e-mail with one paragraph from each of a dozen different articles.

Well this one was an interesting paragraph, it caught my eye immediately. It was written by a guy who will shortly graduate from an MBA programme. He's writing a blog for the magazine and in the blog he's chatting about how his peer students are lining up full-time jobs etc.

The bit that caught my eye was something of an off-hand statement, probably not meant to be significant but it just touched a nerve in me.

Now I'm not one of those people who goes off on a rant about apostrophes (really I'm not) and I have been prone to the odd bit of bashing and gnashing about plain speaking, such as this previous post.

However I think that some words that have crept into common parlance are silly. For some reason, and anyone with an interest in etymology will be able to explain why this is, we seem to feel a need to throw away perfectly good words and expressions and replace them with new alternatives that don't really make sense.

In this case I'm talking about the word "bond" or more specifically about the word "bonding". Everyone knows what bonding is. It's what you do when you go out with people, spend time with people, socialise with people. In truth it means "being" with people.

Pediatricians, child psychologists (that's psychologists that specialise in child behaviour, not psychologists under the age of 12) and other specialists working in the general field of birth, labour and babies will tell you that bonding is an important stage of a young baby's life. I can definitely buy this idea. The baby has lived in a fluid-filled bag for 9 months, suddenly there is light and everything is really loud and "something" is staring at the baby smiling like crazy, maybe even prodding the baby's chin.

Bonding is the phase where the baby figures out that the parent is not dangerous, that these noises (coochy coo etc.) are (relatively) normal and that the parent is planning to stick around. A baby knows and understands nothing and is anxious so bonding is important.

10 guys going to a bar to drink beer and bond. This is not really bonding. I mean really, where is the bonding? This is being with other guys, except bonding makes it sound like some kind of group-dynamic-changing structured exercise, while the meaning of "being with other guys" has been warped into meaning something else. How did that happen?

So I think we need less "bonding" and more "being" with other people. Deal?