Friend - someone who would help you move a body

From Is it really true that “three quarters of whites don’t have any non-white friends”? by Eugene Volokh. Volokh is dissecting the faulty mathematics underpinning an absurd claim, "three quarters of whites don’t have any non-white friends". Not only is the methodology flawed in the underlying study, and not only has the author of the article then also misinterpreted the already faulty conclusions. As if that were not bad enough, there is a complete failure to define what constitutes a friend. Given residential assortation, a fundamental result of people's freedom to choose, I do suspect that there are significant skews on different criteria for any particular population. However, this study, as Volokh demonstrates, does not support that conclusion.

Volokh's article is a reasonably good skewering of cognitive pollution. The real value is in the comments where one commenter clarifies the importance of definitions, particularly the definition of "friend".

Unless you can nail down the definition of "friend", there's nothing to discuss.

English is particularly poor in single words describing relationships between people. I tend to reserve the word "friend" for "would help you move a body" relationships. My wife will use "friend" to describe someone she's spoken to twice and doesn't know the full name of.