fellow

Fig. friendly to everyone; falsely friendly to everyone. (Usually said of males.) Yes, he's friendly, sort of hale-fellow-well-met. He's not a very sincere person. Hail-fellow-well-met—you know the type. What a pain he is. Good old Mr. Hail-fellow-well-met. What a phony!

a normal and dependable guy. Don't worry about Tom. He's a regular guy. He won't give you any trouble.

a man who is hail-fellow-well-met is very friendly and pleasant, often in a way that you do not trust He was a hail-fellow-well-met sort of a man who'd greet you with a big slap on the back.

Also, regular fellow. A nice or agreeable person, as in Luke's a regular guy, or Hilda's a regular fellow. [Colloquial; first half of 1800s]

A peculiar alliance or combination, as in George and Arthur really are strange bedfellows, sharing the same job but totally different in their views . Although strictly speaking bedfellows are persons who share a bed, like husband and wife, the term has been used figuratively since the late 1400s. This particular idiom may have been invented by Shakespeare in The Tempest (2:2), "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows." Today a common extension is politics makes strange bedfellows, meaning that politicians form peculiar associations so as to win more votes. A similar term is odd couple, a pair who share either housing or a business but are very different in most ways. This term gained currency with Neil Simon's Broadway play The Odd Couple and, even more, with the motion picture (1968) and subsequent television series based on it, contrasting housemates Felix and Oscar, one meticulously neat and obsessively punctual, the other extremely messy and casual.

Someone sympathetic to the beliefs and activities of an organization but not a member of that group. The phrase originally applied to people in the early days of the Soviet Union who supported the Russian revolution and the Communist Party but were not members. Communism was popular among many American intellectuals during the 1930s and '40s, but following World War II, this country's attitude toward the Soviets changed in light of Stalin's purges and revelations of espionage. Accusations that Soviet sympathizers had infiltrated our government and military led to congressional investigations, and the phrase “fellow traveler” was used to label those accused of “un-American” activities or even just “Communist dupes.” Many such people found themselves blacklisted or otherwise persecuted. A rarely used vestige of the phrase now applies to anyone who agrees with any viewpoint or faction but does not publicly work for it. The Soviet Union named its early space satellites “Sputnik,” the Russian word for “fellow traveler.”