Q&A: Dude
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Q. I was taken aback to read the following in Jerome K Jerome's
book Three Men in a Boat, which was published in 1889: "Maidenhead
itself is too snobby to be pleasant. It is the haunt of the river
swell and his overdressed female companion. It is the town of showy
hotels, patronised chiefly by dudes and ballet girls." Just how
long have dudes been with us? [Robert W M Greaves]
A. Many people have come across references to dudes in connection
with dude ranches, where urbanites could experience a sanitised
version of Western life, and it is often assumed that this is the
source of the term. However, "dude ranch" is relatively recent,
with the first known examples being from 1921. The Oxford English
Dictionary's first example of "dude" is from 1883. It's definitely
an Americanism. So what was it doing, unremarked as a foreignism,
in a British book as early as 1889?
The cause was an extraordinary craze or fashion identified by that
name which erupted in New York and its neighbourhood in early 1883.
On 25 February, the Brooklyn Eagle noted an addition to the
language:
It is d-u-d-e or d-o-o-d, the spelling not having been
distinctly settled yet. Nobody knows where the word came
from, but it has sprung into popularity within the past
two weeks, and everybody is using it... The word "dude"
is a valuable addition to the slang of the day.
Earlier cases of "dude" are on record - the Historical Dictionary
of American Slang takes it back to 1877 and there are examples of
it as a personal name or nickname even before then. But it is clear
from the article that these had made no impression on the American
public.
A description of the "dude", model for all that followed, appeared
in the New York Evening Post early the following month:
A dude, then, is a young man, not over twenty-five, who may be
seen on Fifth Avenue between the hours of three and six, and
may be recognized by the following distinguished marks and
signs. He is dressed in clothes which are not calculated to
attract much attention, because they are fashionable without
being ostentatious. It is, in fact, only to the close observer
that the completeness and care of the costume of the dude
reveals itself. His trousers are very tight; his shirt-collar,
which must be clerical in cut, encircles his neck so as to
suggest that a sudden motion of the head in any direction will
cause pain; he wears a tall black hat, pointed shoes, and a
cane (not a "stick"), which should, we believe, properly have
a silver handle, is carried by him under his right arm,
(projecting forward at an acute angle, somewhat in the manner
that a sword is carried by a general at a review, but with a
civilian mildness that never suggests a military origin for
the custom). When the dude takes off his hat, or when he is
seen in the evening at the theatre, it appears that he parts
his hair in the middle and "bangs" it. There is believed to be
a difference of opinion among dudes as to whether they ought
to wear white gaiters.
The article noted that dudes, unlike the mashers of the time and
the fops, dandies and swells of earlier generations, set out to
give an impression of protesting against fashionable folly and of
being instead serious-minded young men with missions in life: "A
high-spirited, hilarious dude would be a contradiction in terms."
But dudes were also widely reported as being vapid, with no ideas
or conversation.
The Brooklyn Eagle fleshed out this portrait by noting that a dude
was as a rule a rich man's son, was effeminate, aped the English,
had as "his badge of office the paper cigarette and a bull-crown
English opera hat", was noted for his love of actresses (to the
extent of carrying on scandalous "affairs") but with no knowledge
of the theatre.
In June, the Daily Northwestern reported that dudes had taken to
wearing corsets, "in order to more fully develop and expose the
beauties of the human form divine". The Richwood Gazette of Ohio
argued in July that the dude was useful "as an example of how big a
fool can be made in the semblance of a man"; the Prince Albert
Times of Saskatchewan noted the same month that "The dude is one of
those creatures which are perfectly harmless and are a necessary
evil to civilization." The Manitoba Daily Free Press reported the
story, "bearing evident marks of reportorial invention", that a dude was
seen being chased up Fifth Avenue, by a cat.
You will gather that "dude" was a term of ridicule, not approval.
The geographical spread of the references shows that the whole of
North America was variously intrigued and disgusted by the spread
of the dude phenomenon in the cities of the East Coast. The Atlanta
Constitution remarked in June, "So great a success the dude has had
here in the United States, most every newspaper in the country has
written editorials on him and brought him before the public in such
manner as to create comment, if not surprise." News of him crossed
the Atlantic very quickly. In fact, the OED's first example of the
word is from The Graphic, a popular illustrated paper of London.
Its report in March 1883 reads as if it were cribbed from the New
York Evening Post: "The one object for which the dude exists is to
tone down the eccentricities of fashion ... The silent, subfusc,
subdued 'dude' hands down the traditions of good form."
"Dude" became widely known in the UK and it isn’t surprising
that Jerome K Jerome came across the term, as he was at the time an
actor in London. Indeed, some American newspapers stated at the
time that the term had been brought to New York from the London
music halls and that this was the reason for the pronounced
Anglophile streak in the fashion. But, so far as I know, nobody has
found British examples that predate the US ones.
That leaves us without any direct leads to the source of "dude".
But it has been plausibly linked to the very much older "duds" for
clothes, which could in particular refer to ragged or tattered ones
or even to rags (hence, at the very end of the nineteenth century,
"dud" meaning something useless); "dudman" was an old term for a
scarecrow. We may guess that "dude" was a sarcastic way to describe
the foppish dress of these fashionable young men.
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 561 Saturday 10 November 2007
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