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Concept
Dude
Summary
Dude is American slang for an individual, typically male. From the 1870s to the 1960s, dude primarily meant a male person who dressed in an extremely fashionable manner (a dandy) or a conspicuous citified person who was visiting a rural location, a "city slicker". In the 1960s, dude evolved to mean any male person, a meaning that slipped into mainstream American slang in the 1970s. Current slang retains at least some use of all three of these common meanings.
The term "dude" may have derived from the 18th-century word "doodle", as in "Yankee Doodle Dandy".
In the popular press of the 1880s and 1890s, "dude" was a new word for "dandy"—an "extremely well-dressed male", a man who paid particular importance to his appearance. The café society and Bright Young Things of the late 1800s and early 1900s were populated with dudes. Young men of leisure vied to display their wardrobes. The best known of this type is probably Evander Berry Wall, who was dubbed "King of the Dudes" in 1880s New York and maintained a reputation for sartorial splendor all his life. This meaning of the word, though rarely consciously known today, remains occasionally in some American slang, as in the phrase "all duded up" for getting dressed in fancy clothes.
The word was used to refer to American Easterners, specifically referring to a man with "store-bought clothes". The word was used by cowboys to unfavorably refer to the city dwellers.
A variation of this was a "well-dressed man who is unfamiliar with life outside a large city". In The Home and Farm Manual (1883), author Jonathan Periam used the term "dude" several times to denote an ill-bred and ignorant but ostentatious man from the city.
The implication of an individual who is unfamiliar with the demands of life outside of urban settings gave rise to the definition of dude as a "city slicker", or "an Easterner in the [American] West". Thus "dude" was used to describe the wealthy men of the expansion of the United States during the 19th century by ranch-and-homestead-bound settlers of the American Old West.
Official source
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