ON FRIENDS: PART I

So I've been thinking about friends lately.  Not actual people mind you, but the idea of them.  The jokers among you might say this is because I don't have any (bite me), but the truth is, I am having some trouble with the broadness of the word.  Like the rice noodle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_noodles, the definition of important words should be narrow.  For example, when I say 'tax' or 'nudity' or 'you're a douchebag' you know exactly what I mean (In the case of 'nudity' this is true even at the acronym level.  I doubt there is a man over the age of 13 who couldn't tell you what BN stands for at the beginning of any cable movie let alone N or SSC.  Oh just google it girls.).  Now while 'Friend' is a similarly important word and should, likewise, be narrowly defined, it is instead given the Chow Fun noodle treatment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_chow_fun, its definition broad and unwieldy.  Sure we have 'aquaintance', 'this person I know', 'the person with whom I have an embarrassing sexual involvement' and many other terms we use when 'Friend' does not suffice, but what about when friends does suffice?  What does the word mean when it can encompass the guy you met a month ago who lets you play with his Xbox360 (God, you people have dirty minds!) and the person with whom you share a deep and secret love for Battlestar Galactica (I mean if you like that kind of stuff... Not that I do, though if I did it would be totally justified given that "Rolling Stone" called it the best show on TV two years in a row.  I'm just saying... if I was a fan.).  The word is demeaning.  It denigrates the value of individuals and lumps them all together like some kind of communist mixer.  I'm surprised Fox News hasn't accused Barak Obama of creating "friends".  (The word not the show, if he'd created the show I imagine he'd have been President a while back and would  now be sitting on a beach somewhere retired. Also and this is probably a minor point, but am I supposed to know the difference between socialists and communists?  I feel like I am.) For these reasons, and because I like naming things, I submit that we do away with the word's usage as currently employed, and instead create a hierarchy of friends, a new lexicon with easily identifiable prefixes and suffixes that identify just how close you really are with friend X.

Tomorrow: The hierarchy is revealed!