You can look the word up again and again

Unfortunately, my copy of Whodini's Escape languishes on casette in a barn in another state, so I have nothing musical to share with you, but do point to Whodini as examples of a group of citizens concerned about words and their meaning:

Friends
Is a word we use everyday
Most the time we use it in the wrong way
Now you can look the word up, again and again
But the dictionary doesn't know the meaning of friends

It is an example some would do well to emulate. You'd expect the paper of record to share Whodini's philological concerns, but you would be mistaken:

An entrée of ginger-glazed Alaskan king crab legs consisted of stringy flesh under a cloying varnish. It tasted like a canned seafood candy bar, so odd and unappealing that the friend who ordered it justifiably said she wouldn't have felt any more dispirited if a server had mugged her for the $27 that the dish cost.

Ok, Bruni's friend (how many of us have them?) feels ripped off by the king crab legs she's eating while rocking on Uncle Punch's dime. But getting mugged is not dispiriting. Here is dispirited. If you were mugged by the waitron of a trendy faux-Japanese boite, you might feel the crushing weight of despair settling on your soul like a soggy eiderdown, or a desire to swap your Wayfarers for a bag of newly-baked rolls,  but you would  probably feel angry, violated, scared, so forth, before you got around to that. Fussy, yes, but imprecision in language is the route to a return to the world of Jean Auel, which is a world without Whodini. Nobody wants that.