Heard on The Judges:_dude_,slight semantic shift

[Wilson Gray]

FWIW, I'm annoyed with myself for not going with the spelling _dood_.
Who knows? In the future, some kid might read something published
before ca. 1955 and be completely confused. ;-)

-Wilson

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 11:03 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on The Judges:_dude_,slight semantic shift
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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