Daniel Teplan
Professor Tyson Ward
FIQWS 10113
24 October 2015
“Are we all just dudes?”
Slang terms we use change almost on a daily basis. Old terms get forgotten or evolve into something new, and new ones are made up. We rarely think about the origin of words and that’s why it may seem shocking to find out what it first meant. This is also the case with the word ‘dude’. The word that today is regarded as a friendly approach was considered rather an insult, when first used in the 1870’s. But is just being friendly enough to be friends with someone?
The best way too see the evolution of a word is a diachronic approach, which allows us to examine the changes the word went through in time. The Oxford English Dictionary simply says that the origin ‘dude’ is unknown. Other sources say that the word originates from the German word Dudeldop (sometimes spelled Dudendop), but this is considered highly unlikely. The most popular belief is that it originates from the term ‘Yankee Doodle’. Research on the word, first published in Comments on Etymology, yielded that the ‘dude’ originates from ‘Yankee
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In the 1930’s African-American and Spanish communities started to use “dude” without being pejorative but still used to call out someone who is fancy looking. This later evolved to mean just a simple man. At this point it was a street slang, but still not to popular. The next major point in the evolution of “dude” was when lower class white people picked it up. “Dude” seemed to fit the laidbackness of the California surf culture starting in the 1960’s. At this point “dude” was still used in many ways which was well shown in the 1969 movie Easy Rider when the two motorcyclist from California encounter a lawyer somewhere in Arizona and call him a “dude” which he thinks is an insult, but they make it clear to him that “dude” is just a regular sort of