you dudes = "you guys"

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:04 AM -0800 11/25/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>My daughter-in-law testifies in the court of usage that female
>thirty-somethings in the Denver area can address groups of their
>female peers as "you dudes" (though not so often as "you guys").
>The singular "dude" is also used in direct address among young women.

Consistent with the observations in the Scott Kiesling AmSp paper
(which was not set in Colorado, if memory serves).  Kiesling doesn't
treat "you dudes" as a term of address, though.

>
>   She isn't sure, though, whether an utterance like "That isn't a
>rock! It's a dude!" could indicate an unknown woman, though she
>suspects so.
>
>   JL
>
There's a somewhat unsettling series of commercials for Bud Light
these days in which a series of vignettes is shown to which a (male)
character or voice-over intones "dude" in each case, typically in
situations in which no term of address reading is possible.  That's
the total audio track, just "dude...dude...dude...dude..."  Maybe you
have to be young, and/or someone who doesn't mind drinking Bud Light,
to appreciate it.

LH

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