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"Dude!" (excited greeting) "I talked to Cindy yesterday!"
"Dude." (said with a suggestive cadence to express Cindy's attractiveness).
"Dude, she said she was going out with that dude (mutual acquaintance).
"Dude?!" (sickened horror).
"Dude." (commiserating with friend's shocked disbelief).
So just where and when did this multi-faceted word originate? It first showed up in the late 19th century, probably as a variation on "dud," a Victorian slang term meaning "article of clothing" (still heard today as "duds"). The original dudes were fops and dandies, well-to-do young men who were known for their fancy style of dressing and self-indulgent lifestyles. The word later made its debut in the western United States as a disparaging term for any city-dwelling visitor to cowboy country. The taming of the West brought a flood of tourists from the East, and "dude ranches" quickly sprang up to give the visitors a taste of "cowpoke life." In the 1930s, "dude" mutated a bit and came to be used as a general synonym for "guy" or "fellow," without its former connotations of dandyism; at this point, the term seemed to be slowly fading away. The early 1960s surfer culture of Southern California, however, gave "dude" a shot in the arm, transforming the word into one of its basic units of linguistic exchange. After cruising through the 1960s and 70s as a low-level slang term, "dude" hit the big time again in the 1980s courtesy of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and is still going strong today, particularly among many dudecentric music writers, including CL's.
Have a question for Who Knew, dude? Email it to sam.boykin@cln.com.
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