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By Alice Northover

While I already gave my opinion of the best OUPblog posts of the year, it’s only fair to see what you the reader decided. Here’s our top ten posts according to the number of pageviews they received.

(10) “Olympic confusion in North and South Korea flag mix-up” by Jasper Becker

(9) “Five GIFers for the serious-minded” by Alice Northover

(8) “Seduction by contract: do we understand the documents we sign?” by Oren Bar-Gill

(7) ““Remember, remember the fifth of November”” by Daniel Swift

(6) “Puzzling heritage: The verb ‘fart’” by Anatoly Liberman

(5) “The seven myths of mass murder” by J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D.

(4) “Oh Dude, you are so welcome” by Anatoly Liberman

(3) “How New York Beat Crime” by Franklin E. Zimring

(2) “Oxford Dictionaries USA Word of the Year 2012: ‘to GIF’” by Katherine Martin

And the number one blog post of the year is…

(1) “SciWhys: Why do we eat food?” by Jonathan Crowe

And I thought it would be interesting to note that our eleventh most popular blog post of 2012 is actually from 2009. People still enjoy arguing about unfriending.

Alice Northover joined Oxford University Press as Social Media Manager in January 2012. She is editor of the OUPblog, constant tweeter @OUPAcademic, daily Facebooker at Oxford Academic, and Google Plus updater of Oxford Academic, amongst other things. You can learn more about her bizarre habits on the blog.

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The post Top ten OUPblog posts of 2012 by the numbers appeared first on OUPblog.

By Anatoly Liberman

I borrowed the title of this post from an ad for an alcoholic beverage whose taste remains unknown to me. The picture shows two sparsely clad very young females sitting in a bar on both sides of a decently dressed but bewildered youngster. I assume their age allows all three characters to drink legally and as much as they want. My concern is not with their thirst but with the word dude. After all, this blog is about the origin of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, rather than the early stages of alcoholism.

My experience confirms the observations of several people who have published on dude: it has become an all-purpose form of address among young men. Surveys show that college age women also use it, but my notes contain no examples. In future, dude may develop like guy. You guys is now unisex; one day, you dudes may become equally “cool.” A very full overview of the history of dude can be found in the journal Comments on Etymology 23/1, 1993, 1-46. Not surprisingly, the origin of dude is unknown. Monosyllables beginning and ending with b, d, g (and even with p, t, k) are the dregs of etymology. Consider bob, bib, gig, gag, and tit (exchange tit for tat if you care). I believe that kick is a borrowing from Scandinavian, but its Icelandic etymon is merely “expressive” and shares common ground with bib, bob, and their ilk.

Dude is a member of a small but happy family: dod “cut off, lop, shear,” dud, duds, and dad. Only did has an ancestry any word can be proud of; the same is partly true of agog, but then agog is not a monosyllable. The OED (in an entry first published in 1897) called dude a factitious slang term. This statement inspired a rebuff from one of our best experts in the history of slang: “There is not a shred of evidence that dude arose factitiously, i.e., somehow artificially. OED simply should have said: ‘Origin unknown’.” Yet a non-artificial origin of dude is hard to come by. I never miss an opportunity to refer to Frank Chance and Charles P.G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary, a sadly underquoted, undercited work (among the greats only Skeat seems to have recognized its value). This is what Scott wrote about dude:

“A slang term which has been the subject of much discussion. It first became known in colloquial and newspaper use at the time of the so-called ‘esthetic’ movement in dress and manners in 1882-3. The term has no antecedent record, and is prob. one of the spontaneous products of popular slang. There is no known way, even in slang etymology, of ‘deriving’ the term, in the sense used, from duds (formerly sometimes spelled dudes…), clothes in the sense of ‘fine clothes’; and the connection, though apparently natural, is highly improbable.”

It will be seen that Scott and the OED had a similar attitude toward dude.

Perhaps both the OED’s editor James A.H. Murray and Scott were right. Yet one point should be made in connection with their opinion. The history of slang words deserves as much attention as that of more genteel words. Quite often even good dictionaries, in the etymological parts of their entries, confine themselves to the “explanation” slang, as though saying that a word had at one time was “low” sheds ligh

Thanks to Jonathon Green’s magnificent three-volume Dictionary of Slang, which arrived yesterday compliments of Oxford University Press, I’ve already learned that the first recorded use of “bad shag” dates to 1788, that to “beat skin”* (1944) doesn’t mean what you think, you pervert, and that the term “dude” was once (1883) considered so offensive that “a vigorous Bloomington woman cowhided a clerical editor for calling her a dudess.” (Eternal disclosure.)

“Courage pills” (1933) are heroin in tablet form. “Coño,” a hometown favorite, gets an entry, as it should; you might want to look it up before you run out into the streets and start shouting it at people. As for “douchebag”: raise your hand if you’d like to see a usage shout-out to Alex Balk, circa TMFTML; has any single man in history worked as tirelessly, and as effectively, to restore an epithet to the lexicon, with so little recognition?

More to come — I’m still making my way through Volume 1 — but for now do read Colin MacCabe’s review for the New Statesman. An excerpt:

In these three volumes, Green has dared to put slang on the level of The Oxford English Dictionary, offering illustrative citations, arranged in historical order, for all of his headings and subheadings.

Such a venture runs into the problem that slang has a particular affinity with the spoken rather than the written language. And, indeed, with the exception of certain 17th-century dramas, the early sources are mainly specialised “canting” dictionaries that promised to furnish the innocent countryman with a guide to the evils of the city. It seems to be impossible to imagine slang without cities, without worlds in which anonymous figures can speak to you in words you cannot understand.

The rise of the novel led to an ever-increasing representation of forms of speech both low and high – and slang is always refreshingly low. The significant burst of written sources comes with universal literacy and pulp fiction at the turn of the 20th century. But then there is also cinema, as well as popular music, television and now the internet. Green, with an industry to match Dr Johnson’s, has ploughed through his sources, and offers, in his Dictionary of Slang, both an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the history of the language and one hell of a good read. If we take our three underground phrases and consult Green, we find that the use of “pig” as a word for the forces of authority dates back to the end of the 18th century and the struggles that pitted the corresponding societies against Pitt’s repressive state. One further discovers that “get one’s act together” comes from United States black English, probably the single most fertile source of slang in the 20th-century anglophone world and the source of such other staples of the countercultural vocabulary as “heavy” and “groovy”. “Front”, in the sense of to advance money, is first quoted as late as 1961, but “bread” in the sense of money dates back to 1938 – though all the quotations place it in that creative linguistic circle that surrounded black music.

It is here that one migh

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By Michelle Rafferty

Last week we prepared for the Academy Awards by discussing words and phrases coined from film (twitterpated, to bogart, party on) as well as linguistic choices in film this year (Winkelvii, ballerina lingo, The Kids are All Right, not alright) . While watching the awards last night it occurred to me that we failed to address one of the most important cinematic words of all time: dude. Or in the parlance of our time: The Dude.

But before we get to Lebowski (who, thanks to Sandra Bullock, did get a shout-out last night) let’s go back 30 years, when Hollywood gave us surfer dude. According to Matt Kohl, Senior Editorial Researcher at the OED:

The negative stigma resulted from earlier Hollywood portrayals of surf culture, which were by and large unflattering, especially with respect to intelligence. Spicoli in Fast Times (1982) is a pretty iconic example.

And then:

15+ years later, we get Lebowski from the Coen brothers. Though there are some indications of Spicoli in him: long hair, shabby attire, and a relaxed attitude toward drug-use and the law, it’s evident right away that The Dude isn’t derivative of Fast Times, Bill & Ted, or any other 80s dude convention…For the generation of viewers that fell in love with The Big Lebowski, dude took on a whole new meaning.

"Duuuude" vs. The Dude

While the Cohen brothers’ dude continues to have positive associations, religious adherence in some cases  (see: dudeism, Lebowski Fest), the surfer sense of dude has seen substantial backlash in the last 5-10 years. As Matt told me:

Now some surfers won’t use the word at all. In fact, there’s a making-of feature in Riding Giants, which is one of the more high-profile surf movies to come out recently, in which the director talks about the fact that none of the surfers featured in his movie uses “dude” or any of that beach-stoner vernacular.

Where Dude Originally Came From

Oscar Wilde, the original dude?

When the term first

Dude by Christopher Aslan (Illustrated by: Emily Mullock)

Reviewed by: Chris Singer

About the author:

Christopher Aslan is the award-winning author of Lilly and Lucy’s Shadow and Wenda the Wacky Wiggler. With Dude, he was inspired to create a fun and cool way for kids and adults to experience feelings – even the sometimes ignored and icky ones. Christopher loves the art of visual storytelling and extends his passion in many areas of picture book publishing – from art direction to character development, he enjoys a truly collaborative experience. When he’s not creating picture books you’ll find him writing screenplays, T.V. scripts, or developing ideas for animation.

About the illustrator:

Emily Mullock was born and raised in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia and grew up experimenting in the arts through finger painting, crayons, and mud. She graduated to other, tidier, mediums, taking art courses at UCFV and later, completing the 2D Commercial Animation program at Capilano College. Her work experience in the animation industry includes art direction, and design. Other published works include a colouring book for BC’s Children’s hospital.

About the book:

Dude, where one simple word and a cool little kid take us on a fun-filled journey through the world of feelings. You can start at the beginning or open the book to any page and see if you can guess what Dude might be feeling.

My take on the book:

We’ve all heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words” but have you ever thought about a word being worth a thousand feelings? In Dude, Christopher Aslan and Emily Mullock team up to on 27 illustrations with the intention of welcoming us to the world of Dude; one word, many feelings. It is then our job as readers to figure out what Dude is feeling and even what we might feel in the same situation.

I love this book! It was so much fun to read which sure sounds a little weird since it’s only the same word on each page. Maybe I should just say how cool it was to try and guess what the Dude’s feelings were in each picture. There’s an answer key at the book for checking your answers. There’s also a neat little poem at the very end which ties everything together quite nicely.

Christopher Aslan likes to individually choose the illustrator for his books and he made a solid choice with Emily Mullock. The illustrations are brilliantly done and really make this book special.

I can see Dude being a really good asset for child therapist’s or for classroom use as well. Way back when I was a teacher, I would have used this book for writing lessons by having a student write a story about what’s going on in one of the pictures. As a dad, I’ll definitely use this book to discuss feelings and about how the same

Mark Peters, a language columnist for Good and Visual Thesaurus, as well as the blogger behind The Pancake Proverbs, The Rosa Parks of Blogs, and Wordlustitude is our guest blogger this week. In this post, he looks at language and the love of The Big Lebowski.

I don’t do cults.

I never joined a doomsday cult, even for the free tote bag. I tried starting my own cult, based on voodoo and pancakes, but the ranks are thin. Despite my admiration for Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, I never drank enough Tribble-ade to qualify for Trekkie status. I’m just a non-cult-y guy.

But if there’s one cult that could secure my lifetime membership, immortal soul, and adorable firstborn, it would be the following dedicated to The Big Lebowski—the 1998 Coen brothers film, starring Jeff Bridges and John Goodman, that I seem able to watch on any given day, at any particular time, no matter how many previous viewings have taken place that week. The overall weapons-grade awesomeness of this movie has spawned Lebowski Fests, academic books, and plenty of what-have-you, but I love The Big Lebowski mainly because of the language, which is juicy, quotable, and frequently used as a dog whistle to identify other fans.

My mind isn’t limber enough to summarize this brain-humper of a movie, except to say it is, as J.M. Tyree and Ben Walters write in their Film Classics book, “a struggle between the harmless idiots and the harmful idiots of this world”. The harmless folks are led by Jeffrey Lebowski (much better known as “the Dude”) and Walter Sobchak—two bowling enthusiasts and sixties holdovers from opposite ends of the spectrum. The harmful group includes Jeffrey “The Big” Lebowski, a quartet of nihilists, and some non-house-trained, non-rug-respecting goons. No one achieves much of anything, which makes the word Achiever—the Lebowski-lover’s equivalent of Trekkie, Deadhead, or Twihard—all the more amusing.

“Achiever” is mega-prominent in the movie, usually as a contrast to the Dude’s non-achieving ways, as the wall of the older Lebowski has pictures and plaques celebrating The Little Lebowski Urban Achievers and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce Business Achiever Award. In a memorable image, the Dude gapes into a mirror with the Time logo and “Man of the Year” emblazoned on top, plus the words, “Are you a Lebowski achiever?” on the side. Later, the plaque-collecting Lebowski speaks of his wife’s kidnappers as “Men who are unable to achieve on a level field of play” and accuses the Dude of failing “…to achieve, even in the modest task that was your charge…” With all this talk of achievement, it’s no wonder the Achievers adopted the name.

Though the words of just about any cult fave will get parroted—TV and movies spread terms like KFC-phobia in a chicken coop—Achievers who ape Lebowski lingo are more in tune with their source material than most. In the film, phrases such as “In the parlance of our times,” “Nothing is fucked,” and “It really tied the room together” (a reference to the Dude’s rug) flit from one character to another. Quotat

I was dreaming last night about my WIP, which woke me, which made me think about my dream, which had my characters in it talking about something that had nothing to do with my manuscript. But then that got me thinking about a scene and anyone who has insomnia from time to time knows that once you start thinking in that way sleep is not coming back.

I blame it on the characters.

Our creations can be quite vocal sometimes. You can hear them grumbling and moaning and laughing. I’m just glad they can’t talk to us directly, or I would get no sleep at all. I can imagine many conversations:

“Dude, are you going to leave me there with this guy talking about Forest Gump? Just kill me.”

Or someone else would complain about how they’re not getting enough page time. Or someone else would complain about how I’d made him or her less kind, more kind, weaker, less intelligent, mean, not mean enough.

Characters are demanding. A writer has a hard time getting them out of his mind when they start making noise. They’re the life of the story. I suppose they have the right.

Scenes from a baseball game...
Read about it HERE on my blog.

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