As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “dude” was “a name given in ridicule to a man affecting an exaggerated fastidiousness in dress, speech, and deportment, and very particular about what is æsthetically ‘good form’.” Later, in the American West, the term came to refer to “a non-westerner or city-dweller who tours or stays in the west of the U.S., esp. Originally, back in the 1800s, “dude” referred to a dandy-ish sort of doofus. “Dude” is a magnificent specimen for discussing language change in general, because its meaning has shifted and shimmied a ton in a relatively short period of time. I’m thinking it’s probably ‘dudes.’ (Seriously, dudes.)” I know a segue when I see one. Rather than fight that battle, we may want to save some indignation for the next awkward form of address to surface. She writes: “Whether from a dearth of suitable alternatives or just from habit, ‘you guys,’ if not completely entrenched, is well on the way to being the standard casual way to address a group. In a terrific article for the Boston Globe, Erin McKean looked at how “guys” is now frequently used to address groups of men and women. (Don’t worry, folks, the change only applied to a new game called Scrabble Trickster.) When it comes to the meaning of words themselves, change is even more upsetting. Recently, the Scrabble world went into a code-4 uproar when it seemed that the rules might be changed to allow proper names. Those of us raised to believe Pluto is a planet will be sticking up for that demoted little rock till we’re buried. The term “Brontosaurus” lost its official status to the correct “Apatosaurus” over a hundred years ago, but try telling that to a dino-loving kid. In November of 2012, dudebro was back in the spotlight when a popular Guardian article detailed the traits of a dudebro, as experienced by the writer of the article and in a humorous effort to create a definitive profile of the dudebro.\n Charting the evolution of a gender-hopping, meaning-changing, spelling-flexible word The name was meant to parody the types of video games young men stereotypically enjoy. In October, the term appeared in the name of a video game, Dudebro II, inspired by a post that imagined the mock title for a first-person shooter video game as, Dudebro, My Shit is Fucked Up So I Got to Shoot/Slice You II: It’s Straight-Up Dawg Time. In 2012, dudebro rose to particular prominence. Together, the term dudebro exaggerates negative qualities variously associated with young, usually white males: heavy beer drinking and pot-smoking, a preppy look, jockish demeanor, and privileged upbringing. In the 2000s, their co-occurrence became frequent enough to fuse them as a closed compound (i.e., dudebro) and earn them an entry on the useful slang barometer, Urban Dictionary. In the 1990s, dude and bro began appearing as a pair in informal address between men and in some instances as a descriptor of a particular type of individual (e.g., a surfer dude bro). By the 1990s, bro expanded, like dude, as a slang term for any “guy” but started shading toward athletic, fraternity-styled white guys, incorporated especially into portmanteau words like brogrammer and bromance. Bro has been shortened in Black English since the 18th century and used throughout its history for fellow black men to refer to one another. In the late 19th century, dudewas used to deride a foppish male and possibly derived from “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” By the 1980s, dude expanded as a general slang term for any “guy,” though it usually carried connotations of being cool, masculine, or airheaded. Both terms are used heavily by stereotypical men to refer to one another. As a word, dudebro is a comical compound of dude and bro, the combination serving to intensify stereotypical young male qualities.
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