tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339541743624368462.post2486355661385609013..comments2024-03-28T22:01:00.225-07:00Comments on Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog: Dudes, Dodos, and Fopdoodles - A History and Etymology of "Dude"!!!Peter Jensen Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042588192094310236noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339541743624368462.post-20729107950627988672022-12-08T13:29:50.760-08:002022-12-08T13:29:50.760-08:00A note as to the first two comments above posted b...A note as to the first two comments above posted by me on February 18, 2019. They were posted by me, for David Gold, after I inadvertently deleted his comments. Those are his comments - not mine.Peter Jensen Brownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00042588192094310236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339541743624368462.post-79299520549451480412022-12-08T13:27:34.717-08:002022-12-08T13:27:34.717-08:00Thank you for the kind words.
As for Remington,...Thank you for the kind words. <br /><br />As for Remington, I am not an expert on that aspect of the potential early references, but others have addressed the issue in Comments on Etymology and elsewhere. There is a section on it in the book.<br /><br />What I understand, is that the HDAS (Historical Dictionary of American Slang) reference comes from an article published in 1988, which in turn relies on a reference published in 1910, but the 1910 reference doesn't specify a date, and no one else has since seen the letter at issue. <br /><br />He wrote about "doods" (in quotation marks, which he did not use in 1877, and different spelling) twenty years later.<br /><br />Bottom line is, no one can date the letter accurately, not even the people who first wrote about it, and it seems inconsistent with his writing style.Peter Jensen Brownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00042588192094310236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339541743624368462.post-5700966730401450582022-12-08T09:53:15.774-08:002022-12-08T09:53:15.774-08:00Congratulations on the new book!
I noticed that ...Congratulations on the new book! <br /><br />I noticed that you're careful to say here that <i>dude</i> "first appeared <b>in print</b> ... on January 14, 1883". I don't mean to ask you to repeat your new book here, but could you clarify where you stand on the 1877 use by Frederic Remington in a personal letter, as quoted in RHHDAS and the OED? Real, fake, mistranscribed? (I'm aware that letter is only attested by a 1910 magazine article and is otherwise unverified.)<br /><br />The teenage Remington was attending a military academy in Worcester, Massachusetts at the time. Perhaps this usage was just very thinly spread in New England. ktschwarznoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339541743624368462.post-27471514595350101912019-02-18T10:06:12.873-08:002019-02-18T10:06:12.873-08:00Part II:
Here are more leads, which you or others...Part II:<br /><br />Here are more leads, which you or others may have already followed up:<br /><br />The etymologies of dude and fopdoodle in The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia.<br /><br />The unsigned piece “The Development of the Dude” in number 923 of The Nation, dated 8 March 1883 (pp. 206-207), where the writer says, “Dude is said to be a London music-hall term, but it has been transplanted here […].”<br /><br />Also taking the word back to England (and thence to Scotland) is this article:<br /><br />McAlpine, R. W. 1901. “Words and Their History.” St. Nicholas. Vol. XXVIII. No. 8. June. Pp. 731-735.<br /><br />The author of the article notes a facetious translation of two lines from Terence (“Ita visus est / Dudum quia varia veste exornatus fuit”): ‘He seemed a dude, because he was arrayed in a jacket of many colors’.<br /><br />Although dude does not come from the Latin adverb dudum 1. ‘for a long time’. 2. ‘some time ago’, finding the earliest evidence for that translation could provide one or more antedatings for dude. <br /><br />The pronunciation shown for dude in the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary includes an onglide (represented by {i}). Whether that feature tells us anything about the age of the word or about its origin remains to be seen.<br /><br />The entry for blister in Joseph Wright’s The English Dialect Dictionary has a quotation from Devonshire that includes the word dude but I cannot tell whether it is the word that is the focus of your attention. Probably not, because otherwise Wright would have had an entry for the word, but one may want to check anyway on the off chance that the quotation could be relevant.<br /><br />It is not impossible that dude derives from New Netherland Dutch. European Dutch has doetje, a derogatory noun variously translated (‘sissy’, ‘wimp’, and so on), and New Netherland Dutch may have had the word too (the literal meaning of the word is ‘little dead one, little lifeless one’). Since most of the extant sources for the latter variety of the language are official documents, it would probably be hard to find evidence for doetje even if the word did exist in New Netherland Dutch.<br /><br />The question of the origin of dude is therefore still open. The final word may never be said because short slangisms – here, a mere three phonemes – may be hard to etymologize.<br /><br /> Peter Jensen Brownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00042588192094310236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2339541743624368462.post-6323959776351736782019-02-18T09:58:24.038-08:002019-02-18T09:58:24.038-08:00David L. Gold
You write that Gerald Cohen, Barry ...David L. Gold<br /><br />You write that Gerald Cohen, Barry Popik, and others “have established, with a high degree of certainty, that the word ‘Dude’ first appeared in print in The World, on January 14, 1883. Despite ridiculously thorough efforts to find evidence of earlier use, all roads lead back to that date. Several apparently earlier attestations, in which ‘dude’ was tossed out casually as though it were already a well-known, established word, have all been shown to have been inaccurately dated, or intentionally misdated.”<br /><br />Since antedatings are possible, it is better to say that the earliest evidence so far uncovered for the word is dated 14 January 1883.<br /><br />J. E. Lighter’s Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has a quotation dated 1913 in which the author recalls a personal experience of 1854, when someone who was wont to spend much time primping himself was called “the dude.” Although a quotation dated 1854 would be stronger evidence, the one dated 1913 is not to be dismissed out of hand. <br /><br />As the etymology editor for volume 1 of that dictionary (1994), I concluded on the basis of the information then available that Lighter’s “orig. unkn.” in the draft that I edited was the best statement.<br /><br />You and others have since 1994 uncovered more information, which gives us a better understanding of the word but also lengthens the list of possible etymologies, so that I would still be agnostic.<br /><br />It may be possible to strengthen your argument (“dude < dodo at least in part”) by referring to Roger W. Wescott’s suggestions that slangisms are often blends of more than one word (Wescott 1979) and that ooglification, that is, the change of vowel to /u/ in the formation of slangisms in American English, as in ugly > slang oogly (Wescott 1980), could have occurred in the birth of dude. <br /><br />Wescott, Roger W. 1979. “Lexical Polygenesis: Words as Resultants of Multiple Linguistic Pressures.” In Wolck and Garvin 1969: 81-92.<br /><br />Wescott, Roger W. 1980. Sound and Sense: Linguistic Essays on Phonosemic Subjects. Lake Bluff, Illinois. Jupiter Press.<br /><br />Wolck, Wolfgang, and Paul Garvin, eds. 1979. The Fifth LACUS Forum 1978. Columbia, South Carolina. The Hornbeam Press.<br />Peter Jensen Brownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00042588192094310236noreply@blogger.com