v.102 â Rise of Fellowship Update Notes

Trouble is, dictionaries often give meanings that are not entirely in touch with current usage.
If you, living in the USA, casually mention "my sidekick" in conversation, would people react the same way as if you said "my friend" or "my confederate" or even "my assistant"?
I think not. I think they are more likely to take it to mean what Wikipedia says it does:

"Assistant" would be the most likely interpretation, yes, with "companion" being the second most common. But then most of my friends are old enough to have vocabularies that extend outside of comics, cartoons and television in general.

I am not going to have this semantic argument again. What you perceive a word to mean has no bearing on it's actual definition. What the dictionary says is the definition. Anything else is a bastardization or misunderstanding. Just because uneducated idiots use "their" instead of "they're" doesn't change it from being a homophone to a synonym.

Would any of your friends take kindly to being referred to as your sidekicks?

They tend to take it just fine, yes.