Category: Weird

I know a segue when I see one. “Dude” is a magnificent specimen for discussing language change in general, because its meaning has shifted and shimmied a ton in a relatively short period of time.

Originally, back in the 1800s, “dude” referred to a dandy-ish sort of doofus. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “dude” was “a name given in ridicule to a man affecting an exaggerated fastidiousness in dress, speech, and deportment, and very particular about what is æsthetically ‘good form’.”

Later, in the American West, the term came to refer to “a non-westerner or city-dweller who tours or stays in the west of the U.S., esp. one who spends his holidays on a ranch,” and the tourist-attracting, money-making ranches they visited were “dude ranches.”

Edible ice guns.

I hate to say it but it is pretty embarrassing that students in the U.S. think Beethoven is a dog and Michelangelo is a computer virus. Hey, a least they are good at video games and texting.

Most young Americans entering university this year can’t write in cursive, think email is too slow, that Beethoven’s a dog and Michelangelo a computer virus, according to an annual list compiled by two academics at a US college. To students who will get their bachelor’s degrees in 2014, Czechoslovakia has never existed, Fergie is a pop singer, not a duchess.

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