Heard on The Judges:_dude_,slight semantic shift

[Mark Mandel]

Yes, I'd've glossed this one as "mensh".

m a m

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 7:01 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> At 5:30 PM -0400 4/16/10, Wilson Gray wrote:
> >Mid-thirty-ish, black male speaker:
> >
> >"Your honor, I was going to get a job and _be a *dude* about it_."
> >[I.e. be a provider for his girlfriend and their family]
> >
> >
> >Certain phrases are common, IME, to all dialects of English and don't
> >get "slangified," so to speak. Replacing "be a *man* about it" with
> >"be a *dude* about it"?
> >
> Interesting.  "He's a real guy" is clearly different from "He's a
> real man", and ditto "be a man/guy about it", "man/#guy up", etc.
> But I'd have thought "dude" was closer to "guy" in such contexts --as
> you say, there seems to be a bit of a shift for this speaker.  For
> me, "he's being a dude about it" would refer to things like declining
> to change diapers or to talk about his feelings rather than being a
> provider for the family.
>
> LH
>
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