Expressing cool solidarity
The linguist Deborah Cameron asks an important question:
The question feminists should be asking about women calling each other ‘dude’ or ‘you guys’ isn’t why they’re talking like men (they aren’t), it’s why they can only express cool solidarity with other women by using prototypically male address terms. Aren’t there any female terms that would serve their purpose just as well?
In principle there are, sure. In practice, there aren’t any yet.
I propose Bletchley.
My only objection is: now _I_ want Bletchley.
The modern usage of “dude” is something I’ve never been able to fully fathom. Any native speakers of English here? :)
In Urban Dictionary I read that it is “a word that Americans use to address each other. Particularly stoners, surfers and skaters.”
Alright, I get it. Cool solidarity, yeah, I get it.
Still, I saw also some guys protesting – claiming that in contemporary feminist language it is often used in a derogatory manner. If you are called a “dude” (not to mention ‘white old straight dude’) on a feminist blog, then … well, you better start packing your weed and your surfboard! Anyway, that was the claim. Is there any truth to this, I wonder? Unfortunately, I’m not able to tell. See, I’m a barbarian. Civilized insults don’t work on me.
By the way, browsing through the Urban Dictionary I found also the word “dudette”, which sounds sooo utterly, incredibly charming to my barbarian ear! Unfortunately, Wikipedia claims that it’s not in use any more. If this is true, I can’t even. To waste such a word!!! You, Americans, must be really out of your minds. What will you do next, elect Donald Trump?
Ariel, ‘dude’ is somewhat like ‘bro’ – positive when the person using the term would apply it to themselves, negative otherwise.
Ariel, I pretty much agree with Anat. When used about yourself or your friends it’s likely to be positive (referring to in-group camaraderie) as opposed to used about other people (most likely in a pejorative “well you’re a looser/don’t give a shit when you should” kind of way). To complicate matters when used in the in-group sense it can also be slightly self-mocking (I’m/we’re not cool even though we’ll pretend I/we are; or even I/we should care about this, but right now I don’t).
When I first heard the word “guy” used to reference a female, that would be in the 80’s, I was genuinely confused by it. After that I had taken this to be an American usage, and quite a recent one at that.
I was brought up in an Irish Catholic family and was taught “guy” was a mild insult because of the association with Guy Fawkes. It was considered O.K. for Americans to say it, as in “Guys and Dolls”, because, well, they’re American. But I have to say that that title grates on the ear.
In the circles I mix in, “dude”, or more likely “cool dude”, is only used ironically, if at all.
Ariel, I like “dudette” too. :)
Feminists sometimes refer to “dudebros,” which are sexist men, usually young. The way I picture him, a dudebro’s sexism is mostly unthinking, but if you challenge it he will rationalize it. Too many challenges and he’ll retreat into MRAland, where he can find endless rationalizations for his sexism, and plenty of commiseration with other men who are being oppressed by feminism.
As for “dude,” what Anat said, mostly. At some point it became popular among surfers and stoners (groups with some overlap,) and from there spread to wider usage. It can be affectionate, ironic, a putdown, or simply a playful synonym for “male person.” The same person can use it all these ways, its meaning determined by context.
The very silly Trey/Parker thing ‘Baseketball’ of some years ago had a short riff on the contextual nature of ‘dude’: a tetchy conversation terminated with a lengthy exchange of nothing else: ‘Dude’ delivered in turn by each party with varying inflections, and apparently conveying sufficient meaning that it eventually settled the dispute.
I must confess when in a sufficiently silly mood I’ve occasionally attempted to at least maintain my half of a conversation in this manner. With varying success.
Dudes and dudettes was definitely a thing when I was a teen. Homies was a while later.
Dudebro is a feminist insult meaning a guy who is not super hostile towards women, but immersed in a homosocial culture and full of gendered assumptions that tend to lead to mansplaining.
When I want to refer specifically to my female friends, I use the term ‘girl mates’.
The idea is that if I call them my girl friends, that sounds like I’m calling them my girlfriends… Which has the wrong connotation.
So I call them my girl mates instead. I’ve never had to explain myself.
Which is really weird. Because when you look at the etymology of it, ‘mate’ has a much more sexual connotation than ‘friend’. But such is culture. :P
I knew about “dudebros”; but I will also try to be more sensitive to contexts. Thanks to all of you, dudes and dudettes :)
Here is a piece of a useless knowledge which I can share in return. I was wondering about the ways women in my country refer to their female friends. One cool word is “laska” – many times I heard it used among women in exactly this way. What’s the meaning?
The origin is unclear. Literally it means “a stick”, but this brings only bafflement: why would anyone want to call women “sticks”?
The most probable explanation is that it is a borrowing from Czech, where it means “love”. However, this is an external knowledge – the word has no such connotation in Polish and I don’t think the users have it in mind. For quite a while it has been used (by everybody) to denote an attractive woman. Something like English “chick”, I guess. Still – as I said – our women ‘culturally appropriated’ the term and I heard it used among them as a cool way to address female pals.
All in all, this may be also one of these examples where a “prototypically male address term” is taken over by women – exactly as in Deborah Cameron’s description.
Hmm. Ariel, one possible way I could see it entering use for a female friend is as a metaphor for a walking stick. So you call walking sticks sticks in Poland? It’s something like a cane without a bend in it, and sometimes more like a staff (if you just pick one up while hiking). When one is walking rather a long way, such an item can give extra support and help stabilize a person on a slope.
Because our friends give us emotional support as we journey through life, I could see a poem or story where one woman explains a walking stick metaphor for friendship entering casual use.
Samantha, I was imprecise in my previous comment. The literal meaning of the word “laska” is *exactly* a walking stick or a walking cane – not “a stick”, as I wrote earlier. For a stick we would use a different expression, so my English translation was erroneous. Sorry.
In effect, your explanation is quite possible in theory (and so nice that I would love it to be true!) but I’m not aware of any arguments supporting it. On the other hand, there is some evidence supporting the Czech origin hypothesis. The word came into use in the 70s, when the Czech song “Ach, ta láska nebeská” – was very popular in Poland, mainly as the source of our incessant amusement: in Czech the title means “Oh, this heavenly love”, in Polish it means rather “Oh, this blue walking stick”.
So it is rather old, but still cool. I know it for a fact. My teenage daughter uses it to refer to her friends and she is a real expert on being cool :)
Perhaps “gurrl”? Although, it is essentially the same pronunciation as “girl,” save the drawn-out “R,” which leaves it, at least in speech, open to abuse by those who will use the one while insisting they used the other.
Re Ariel, #12: The changing of languages between populations is quite fascinating. I can imagine that “nebeská” could easily change from heavenly (“up there,” in the blue sky) to the colour (or a shade of) blue, or vice versa; if “láska” made a similar transition (instead of, say, separate roots in each language), it would be interesting to find out the transition between love and a (walking) stick (agreed that Samantha’s suggestion re support would be nice if it turned out to be true).
Actually, girlfriends took off for a while here, perhaps because of Oprah. I don’t hear it much anymore, but it was often sort of like, ‘hey, girlfriend, what’s happening” of something like that. I never used it myself; it sounded very much like it was dependent on the social set you were in and what their norms were. By the time it came into popular usage, I was a professional woman in my 30s, and it sounded jarring. As far as I can tell, it seems to have fallen out of usage, but my social circle remains similar to what it was then, so I have very little frame of reference on that.
And dudettes seemed to be popular with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so I always assumed that was the main usage for that. I had no idea it had ever been in wider use. The education you get on this site! And it doesn’t leave you in debt for the rest of your life. Thanks, Ophelia. Valuable service.
There’s a linguistic pitfall here. “you guys” is likely to be continued to be used for mixed groups as well as all male groups. If you invent a term for groups that are all female, you make the presence of one male enough to turn the whole group male.
One sees this in Spanish. A group of 100 girls is las niñas. Add one boy, and they are los niños.
That said, addressing a mixed audience, I’m likely to say “folks”. A mixed group of friends addressed informally is more likely to be “guys”.
Cultural appropriation aside, “homies” is the one word I can think of that is truly gender neutral as a casual-cool group address. It’s short for both “homeboy” and “homegirl”, which essentially means “someone from my (real or metaphorical) neighborhood’.
It seems to me that y’all or even “all y’all” is quite gender neutral, not to mention inclusive. Plus, I like the sound of it. It might sound odd if spoken by someone not from one of the southern states, though.
I like y’all for when you want to make clear you mean plural, but you’re right that it sounds odd from a non-Southerner.
And it sounds downright gratingly false coming from a non-American. People would look at me really strangely if I tried that. In fact I’d probably get taken to task.
Mind you it’s perfectly fine to say you all, so the contraction isn’t crucial. In fact you all is clearer to most non-Southerners, who don’t realize y’all is plural.
Mooncups.