Rachel and Monica's new BFFs: New York teenagers

New York

TWENTY-ONE years ago last month, Friends made its debut on NBC, to almost instant acclaim and popularity, beginning a 10-year run that ushered into the culture various styles and mannerisms - Jennifer Aniston's haircut, most notably - in a way that now rarely occurs, because the television landscape has become drastically more diffuse.

On Friends, characters emphasised their adjectives (with "very" and "really" and "so") to such an extent that the habit prompted a study by linguists at the University of Toronto. In 2005, they published a paper asserting that the word "so" was the intensifier used 45 per cent of the time on the show.

In British English, researchers had found, it was used only a quarter as often. "So" was on the rise in the US vernacular, and the series was, theoretically, the cause. If you are 32 or 50, there is a good chance that you are not occupying the world of Friends, which outlines a 90s Manhattan circumscribed by a coffeehouse and a West Village apartment that, true to the period, conjures a Pottery Barn designer's vacation in the lower-tier flea markets of Tuscany. If you are somewhere between 13 and 20, however, and particularly if you live in New York,…