Regular Joe

Regular Joe

Thoughts and opinions from Dispatch columnist Joe Blundo.

Guys and dudes

The words guy and dude are pretty important in America's increasingly informal culture -- and also more or less synonymous. Dude is a little more informal -- you might not want to call, say, your grandfather dude -- but there are many settings in which you can sling around both without offense.

So I was surprised recently to run across word histories on each.

Allan Metcalf, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, highlighted the work of Barry Popik and Gerald Cohen, etymologists who did exhaustive research into dude.

Popik and Cohen, according to Metcalf, concluded that dude probably originated in 1883 and sprang from Yankee Doodle Dandy, the term for a "country bumpkin" trying to mimic the fashionable dress of some young men of the time. The bumpkin is the guy -- there's that word again -- in the song Yankee Doodle who sticks a feather in his cap and calls it macaroni. Macaroni was a slang term for fancy dress.

From doodle came dood, which later morphed into dude.

A dude was decidedly a figure of ridicule in 1883, but as happens with words, the meaning has shifted over the years until now it sounds affectionate.

The story of guy goes back to Guy Fawkes, according to Business Insider. His first name, rare in England at the time, gave rise guy.

Fawkes was one of the plotters who wanted to restore a Catholic to the British throne by blowing up the Protestant king of England in 1605. He was caught, tortured and sentenced to death.

Adam Taylor, writing in Business Insider, says Nov. 5, the day of Fawkes arrest, eventually came to be known as Guy Fawkes Day with celebrations that included burning effigies of Fawkes.

Gradually, guy came to be synonymous with effigy and then as a perforative term meaning something like "bad man." The word spread to the America, where it became a term to describe a man in general.

Now it's gone even more generic, which is why a server in a restaurant will sometimes address the diners at a mixed-gender table collectively as "you guys." (I've also heard young women addressed as dude, so it may be headed the same unisex way.)

Fawkes, although a bad plotter, inspired one of the more useful words in the English language, not to mention those masks favored by the protest group Anonymous. In some circles, the guy Guy must be regarded as a cool dude.