Another Point of Singularity

For those of you not in the know, Grady Booch is considered the top dog, big cheese, numero primero of Objected Oriented design, and his books on the subject are considered a neccesary starting point in the field (I own the book quoted below, in fact!). He actually seems to be a reasonably funny guy as evidenced by his OWN personal blog. I wonder if he was trying to bury a "funny" in the following otherwise dry text interpertation of "friends" in C++ code...

(...) C++ offers even more flexible control over the visibility
of member objects and member functions. Specifically, members
may be placed in the public, private, or protected parts of a
class. Members declared in the public parts are visible to
all clients; members declared in the private parts are fully
encapsulated; and members declared in the protected parts are
visible only to the class itself and its subclasses. C++ also
supports the notion of *friends*: cooperative classes that are
permitted to see each other's private parts.

-Grady Booch
"Object Oriented Design with Applications"