"dude" et al.

[Jonathan Lighter]

For those who may have missed it, Jerry & Barry made a powerful case and thoroughly documented case that "dude" arose from "doodle," as in "Yankee Doodle Dandy."  Get it? Those 19th C. wits, they were a caution !  Yep !

The flippancy is aimed at the wits, not the etymologists.  As usual, they searched through a ton of obscure sources for years and ultimately came to a  plausible conclusion about a 125-year-old mystery.

Kudos to J & B !

JL

"Cohen, Gerald Leonard" <gcohen at UMR.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Cohen, Gerald Leonard"
Subject: "dude" et al.
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A few items:
1) A colleague asked me if there's an article or perhaps a book on expressions for death: "buy the farm," kick the bucket," "bite the dust," "croak," etc. Would anyone know?

2) I somehow missed the American Speech article (fall 2004) on "dude" and can't locate my copy at the moment. Barry Popik and I published quite a bit of material on this term in "Comments on Etymology." I wonder if the American Speech article mentioned it.

3) For the card game "Faro"---Is there any explanation for why it should be named for Pharaoh? If so, then the the hypothesis of an Irish etymology would be wholly unnecessary. On the other hand,...

Gerald Cohen


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