Visit theallusionist.org/dude to hear this episode and find out more about ‘dude’
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, open up language to find a smaller version of language within, and another within that, and another within that.
Today’s episode is about a word that can be a compliment, a term of endearment, an exclamation of surprise, a sort of punctuation in speech, a slang term for a person: and that word is ‘dude’. Its origins really piqued my interest, even though there is no proof of the much-repeated claim that it used to mean an elephant’s bottom or a camel’s foreskin. If you do have evidence that this is legit etymology, please submit it to me at your nearest convenience.
A version of this episode originally played on the podcast Queersplaining, by Callie Wright, so big thanks to Callie for letting me share it with you plus add some more bits of information about this surprising word. There are also some swears.
Before we kick off, I wanted to tell you that if you go to patreon.com/allusionist and sign up to patreonise the show by the end of June 2021, you and all pre-existing patrons get this incredible offer: you can choose a word or short phrase and I will record it for you for you to use as your phone alert or alarm. AND you get access to all the recordings to play with as well! Submissions are anonymous, if that was a concern, and I’m enjoying that some of you have supplied directions for me, such as: “barked angrily as if telling off a naughty rabbit”, and “as if you were Robert Pattinson portraying an awed 17-year-old but actually 100-year-old vampire”. I’m going to have to do some research to perfect my RPattz in Twilight performance, sparkly abs and everything. Anyway get over to patreon.com/allusionist and sign up and your instructions are there.
OK dudes, on with the show.
CALLIE WRIGHT: My name is Callie Wright, and this is Queersplaining.
There was about a year between me coming out to my friends and being able to present myself as Callie a hundred percent of the time. I trace most of my anxiety back to this point in my life. I would find myself walking through stores being hyper aware of the people around me: I’d notice what they were saying, what their body language was saying. No one was ever in my face mean to me, but I heard lots of whispers as I would walk by. One thing I heard more than once was, “Gross, that’s a dude,” or some variant of that. “That’s a dude.”
To this day, little alarm bells go off in my head when I hear that word directed at me by someone I don’t know. I grew up in the Midwest and played music most of my teens and twenties, so I use ‘dude’ in ways that you might expect. I was a dude. All my guy, friends were dudes, anything cool or interesting was “DUDE!” I never quite got to the point of calling my women friends “dude”, that one always felt weird to me.
Obviously, after coming out, the context changed a bunch. Lots of trans folks have really complicated feelings about the word dude, and I’m one of them. So today on the show, we’re going to get to know the word a little better. And when I think about wanting to get to know words and languages better, there is one person who comes to mind.
HZ: Am I allowed to swear on your show?
CALLIE WRIGHT: Absolutely.
HZ: I call bullshit on the gender neutrality of this. Broadly, I am not a huge fan of terms where people say, “Well, they’re gender neutral now: you can say ‘dudes’ about all genders; you can say ‘guys’ about all genders” - because the terms that people say are gender neutral in that way, always originated as male specific terms. And it doesn’t happen the other way round, where you’re like, “Oh, gals is now gender neutral. Ladies is gender neutral.” If you say that about male identified people that tends to be insulting.
CALLIE WRIGHT: Personally, my favorite rhetorical test for this is when some obnoxious guy who’s oozing toxic masculinity is going on and on and on about the context-free gender neutrality of the word ‘dude’, you just ask, “Okay, cool. Do you fuck dudes?”
HZ: Exactly! It’s a great way to test neutrality, ‘sn’t it?
CALLIE WRIGHT: Let’s talk about where dude came from, let’s talk about the etymology. What do you know?
HZ: I was very interested to find out about this, because it kind of meant the opposite of the association it has now as this sort of macho guy term that’s “gender neutral”, sorry to harp on about it. There’s a couple of origins that are possible. And one is that there was this word ‘duds’, like clothing, it’s still a slang word, kind of, now - that’s from the 1300s. And then it sort of became ragged and scruffy clothes a couple of hundred years later. And you had ‘dudman’ or ‘dudeman’, which was a scarecrow made of raggedy clothes in the 1670s. So people were like, “Oh, maybe it was because of that.” But I don’t really see the leap from scarecrow to “Duuude!” Whereas in the 1880s, you had these hipster guys, essentially: the Yankee Doodle Dandies. And these were guys who - you know, from the song, the macaroni - macaroni was also this word for young, effeminate-leaning men who were really dressed up. And I think it was specifically a very East Coast US city type of trend. So you had these yankee doodles and then they started using the shortening ‘dood’, spelt with a double O at the time. And so they were foppish, they were considered effeminate. And then the word headed west, in that you have a lot of East coast people going to ranches in the west for this sort of Wild West experience.
And they were called dude ranches because they were supposed to appeal to these dudes who were still these foppish people from east coast cities. But then you have the people on the dude ranches who are more like cowboys or butch guys on horses. And that’s where that connotation of dude came in, I think - it switched. It leaped from one kind of person to the other.
CALLIE WRIGHT: That’s so wild.
HZ: Right? I was very surprised.
HZ: I thought it was unusual that the word flipped - cowboys used ‘dude’ as an uncomplimentary reference to city dwellers from the east coast, with their ‘store-bought clothes’ - what a burn, “Where did you get your clothes - the clothing store?”
CALLIE WRIGHT: There’s also another thread we can follow through the 1930s and forties Mexican-American pachucos and Black zoot suiters took to using the word dude to refer to each other as an in-group term.
And these were groups of folks who had a style very much centered on their clothing, and it developed into more of a general term of address among the men in those groups. As tends to happen, it made its way from there into the broader culture through Black music.
HZ: White culture of course can’t get enough of pinching vocabulary from Black music. And a big appearance for dude was in the song ‘All the Young Dudes’, written by David Bowie in 1972 for Mott the Hoople. In an interview with the following year, Bowie said the news being carried by all the young dudes was that the Earth would face apocalyptic destruction in five years time, so if you had an image of cool newsboys, nah.
Till about the 1950s, ‘dude’ still had this connotation of someone out of place, a tourist trying to dress like a local and failing. And in that sense, it was gender neutral for a bit. Then, somehow, it became cool. Perhaps thanks to 1960s surf culture, perhaps thanks to movies.
HZ: Apparently the first sort of big moment of it appearing on film was in 1969 in Easy Rider where Peter Fonda’s character explains to Jack Nicholson’s character that dude means nice guy, dude means regular sort of person. So even though, as recently as the 1950s, it was still used to mean these kinds of foppish tourists, by the late 1960s, it was likea regular kind of guy’s guy. And I guess that film would have been quite influential to a lot of filmmakers who came up in the 1970s and 1980s.
CALLIE WRIGHT: I think that makes sense.
HZ: I mean, I’m speculating; I haven’t done the master’s thesis, I’m afraid. In Fast Times at Ridgemont High, you have the Jeff Spicoli character who’s this surfer dude: at the time, were you supposed to think that he’s kind of a useless dick for being like that? Or are you supposed to think he’s rebelling against the capitalism of the 1980s and he doesn’t want to be part of that culture?
CALLIE WRIGHT: I think the latter, I mean, in fairness, it’s been a while since I’ve seen that movie, but if I remember right, he was definitely positioned as the hero in the movie.
HZ: And then also Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure uses dude a lot, and you’re supposed to think they’re young and stupid - or are you?
CALLIE WRIGHT: And this illustrates some of the tension in the word, right?
Its connection to surfer culture is very much about the sort of laidback, easygoing attitude. It positions you in opposition to this hardworking careerism of the 1980s, sort of a rebellion of chilling out.
I was delighted to find out there’s actually been some research done on the various usages of the word ‘dude’. In 2004, Scott Kiesling, a linguistics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, published a paper just called ‘Dude’. That goes over some of the history Helen and I talked about earlier, but it also has some hard data about who uses ‘dude’ and how they use it in different situations. Its information is binary gender, because of course it is - I wasn’t able to find data on the subject that’s not. In spite of its limitations, there is some interesting stuff, though. Kiesling assigned his students a task: over the course of three days, record the first 20 instances of the word ‘dude’ that you hear. Record the entire utterance as best you can remember, and record the gender and ethnicity of the speaker, the addressee, the relationship between them and the situation in which the word was used. They collected 519 examples, and Kiesling assembled them into what he calls “the dude corpus”.
The data showed what I already generally thought was true. Most commonly it’s used with men talking to other men; over 300 of the recorded uses were men talking to other men. Far less often - less than a hundred times - were women using it to address other women; and its use across genders was slightly less common still.
HZ: There’s a few things that that brings to mind. And one is that the word is used to denote in group. And that’s quite a common linguistic thing, where you use these words quite freely, but only with certain people or certain kind of circles that you move in, to delineate those circles. So I can imagine that if you used it between the genders binary as described in this paper, but as you and I both know, are not in reality, the understanding of it would change. And maybe if the men in this study used it for women freely, it might be perceived as an insult, because they’re implying those women are masculine. And maybe the women don’t use it for the men because it would imply more equality than perhaps it was there. Like they’re not on “dude!” terms with these guys. ...I just said ‘guys’, but I meant the men in the study, because to me ‘guys’ is not really a gender neutral term either.
CALLIE WRIGHT: What the data showed was that the closer you were to someone, the more likely you were to use the term for them, right up to the point of a romantic relationship. Kiesling’s conclusion here is that the word serves to express a sort of closeness, but not intimacy; he calls it “cool solidarity.” In a different study of a college fraternity, Kiesling identified five specific uses of the word:
JAMES: One. Discourse structure marking:
CALLIE WRIGHT: Sweet and savoury is a wonderful combination. And fruit is healthy for you, dude. Pineapple belongs on pizza.
JAMES: Two. Exclamation:
CALLIE WRIGHT: Dude, holy shit!
JAMES: Three. Confrontational stance attenuator:
CALLIE WRIGHT: I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, dude.
JAMES: Four. Affiliation and connection:
CALLIE WRIGHT: Oh, you’re my fucking dude.
JAMES: Five. Agreement:
CALLIE WRIGHT: Dude, yes.
So like a lot of language, the way trans folks interact with this can be pretty unique. Personally, I tend to be okay with it, but only under very specific circumstances. Some folks do use it with the intent of being gender neutral and really do use it as a term of address for everyone. If that’s true, I’m okay with it. If your in group is a group I want to be a part of, I want you to use the language that marks me as part of that group. It is pretty common on my roller derby team, for example. I know and love these folks; them using it for me signals that I’m part of their circle, so it’s affirming to me. Some random asshole on the street though? Not a chance! The only time I really use it to identify other people is when I’m talking about a man I don’t like, as in, “This fucking dude over here.”
But I’m one person with a singular experience. And of course my feelings, aren’t the only ones that matter here. So I asked a few folks with different experiences from mine to chime in and share their thoughts too.
KAT: My name is Kat. I don’t really know what my pronouns are yet, but I’m going by they/them right now. Just try to test it out, beause I’m not really sure. I’m trying to figure stuff out. I felt like I was non binary for years, but I’m thinking it’s more so like gender fluid. First of all, I will say it’s not gender neutral the way that people think it is; it definitely is gendered. But, I tend to like it just because for me personally, it seems affirming to me because I’m not a girl. I guess that it’s either like, “Hey girl” or it’s “Hey dude,” like that’s kind of like the only options we’re given a lot of times. And I seem to like it a lot more than that.
CALLIE WRIGHT: Do you have any kind of memory of maybe the first time it was used for you in a way that felt affirming to you?
KAT: I know that it was really early. I don’t have like a very specific memory of it. But I remember that it was really early, and I remember that I started calling myself that a lot, and my close friends. I stopped using it as kind of like a catch-all a little while ago, just cause it’s... Yeah. My ex girlfriend is a trans woman and we’re still really good friends. And I asked her how she felt about it and she didn’t care, but I still felt weird with it, just because of what other people have said, so I stopped. I’ll still use it around like a couple of my friends that, we use it together, but it’s not like a gender neutral thing anymore. I started saying “y’all” a lot more and stuff like that.
MIST: My name’s Mist. My pronouns are they them, and I identify as queer, genderqueer. The main reason why I use it is, for our generation especially, it’s a very awesome word for endearing without having to get too mushy or anything like that. Maybe that’s what the issue is, because it’s masculine and because it’s masculine, it’s not mushy. But, as a nonbinary person with, you know, a pussy, it makes me feel more valid to use vocabulary that’s masculine-leaning because I sound so feminine. So I really don’t mind, but I also can totally understand why somebody would not like that, because I do not like it when people come up to me and be like, “Hey girl” or “girly” and stuff like that. It’s the Midwest, so it’s really hard to avoid that. I mean, when at all in doubt, “y’all” is the best; but I definitely don’t mind, dude.
CALLIE WRIGHT: Do you remember the first time someone maybe use that for you in a way that felt affirming?
MIST: It’s usually with other men, especially cis men. More specifically, if they start calling you “bro” and “dude”, that means you’re accepted in a way.
KAGE: My name is Kage. I use he/him pronouns, but have to put myself as - I prefer trans masculine. I don’t really identify with a binary, but if I had to parse it down, I’d say just male.
My older brother was 17 years older than me. So growing up in the 1990s and whatnot, and ‘dude’ was a huge thing because all like the surfer movies and everything in pop culture and everything was pushing toward like West Coast, kind of that notion of dude, man, bro, everything’s cool. The way that us in the Midwest kind of romanticized how it is in the West. I remember like my older brother and his friends always being like “dude” and whatever. And I want to say the first time was probably when I was about seven or eight, and it just felt really cool to be like part of this thing, you know? This is way bigger than gender: it’s about being accepted. But just having that word being applied to me just felt so... I don’t know, it felt like I was being seen and then invited into the fold. I didn’t think about it critically until obviously years and years later, when I started thinking about gender and whatnot, and how somebody could definitely feel the opposite way. And it made me kind of sad that I could find joy in something like that, that, that could upset someone else. And that’s when I just kind of said, “Well, it’s more important for me to just not, you know?”
So I’ve always believed in the concept of having emotional correctness, when we’re speaking or listening, to understand when you have somebody speaking to you, what is their intent behind what they’re saying? Because we all know the intent is not as important as impact at all. But, for people that care about me, if I know somebody that they use ‘dude’ in the same way that a lot of people use ‘man’, like, “Aw, man, that sucks”, just as like an exclamatory, I think dude is totally fine as being a thing, but it’s always like a know your audience situation. I would never, in a million years, refer to somebody as dude, if 1. I didn’t know them, and 2. if they were expressing to me, “Hey, I don’t like that word. It makes me feel some sort of way.” And having some semblance of the fact that male privilege is a thing, and being perceived as male is a privilege in and of itself in our society, words that are generally used, or that is the context that the words are usually used for - so like ‘dude’, ‘man’, ‘bro’, all of those, I think we should all just stop using them in a blanket way. If it’s an in group thing, if it’s a group of friends and you all refer to each other that way, that’s fine.
But you can’t assume that someone else outside of that is going to understand the intent that you have, and the impact is not going to be within your control. So it’s much easier to just not. You know?
CALLIE WRIGHT: Of course context matters. There’s far more history here than could be covered in a single podcast episode. This is not a shocking or surprising conclusion to come to, and I think it’s probably one of the words that’s best deployed only if you know the person you’re speaking to and you know they’re okay with that. Whatever our enjoyment of the word might be doesn’t override someone else’s discomfort with it in some contexts it’s hurtful and some contexts it’s quite affirming.
Both of these things are valid, especially when it comes to trans folks and how we navigate the world in terms of our gender. Just respect folks. That’s what it always comes down to.
The Allusionist is an independent podcast made by me, for you, and if you want to hear more of me between episodes I make two other podcasts, Answer Me This and Veronica Mars Investigations - but I also sometimes pop up in other people’s shows. You can hear a little cameo from me in an upcoming episode of the brand new show FOGO, Fear Of Going Outside, a really funny nature show with the most reluctant host ever, Ivy Le, an avid indoorswoman who is learning what’s so great about the outdoors and how to go camping. You have my deepest sympathies, Ivy. Listen to Fear of Going Outside in your pod app of choice.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is:
saros, noun, astronomy: a period of about 18 years between repetitions of solar and lunar eclipses. Origin 19th century from Greek, from Babylonian šār(u), ‘3,600 years’, the sense apparently based on a misinterpretation of the number.
Try using ‘saros’ in an email today.
This episode was originally produced by Callie Wright for their podcast Queersplaining, which you can hear at queersplaining.com and in the pod places, and support on Patreon, and thanks to Kage, Kat, Mist and James Croft whose voices you also heard. The allusionist theme is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com and the inventive new podcast Neutrinowatch.
Don’t forget to patreonise the show at patreon.com/allusionist by the end of June 2021 so you can wake up each day to the sound of me shouting your word of choice.
Find the show on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - @allusionistshow is the handle - and to hear or read every episode, find links to more information about each topic, browse a lexicon of all the words ever covered in the show with links to the relevant episodes, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
