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Comments on Etymology

Language(s)

English

Content

1. Introduction ..................................................................... 2

2. Jan. 13, 1883, one day before Robert Sale Hill's poem a New York Mirror gossip columnist described the dudes but was not yet aware of the term.......................... .3

3. The 1883ff. dude craze, with an outpouring of articles/poems/ cartoons providing insight into the nature of the dude ............... 3

4. Peter Reitan: additional early material on dude .......................... 82

a. Additional 1883 attestations of dude .................................. 82

b. 1884 item on dude in the humorous magazine Puck ... ......... ... ... 89

c. 1884 article in New York World: 'Where did "dude" come from? ............................................................................................. 92

4. General observations ....................................................... 104

a. Oscar Wilde .............................................................. 104

b. Language in its social context. ........................................ 104

c. In praise of the individual ............................................. 105

5. References .................................................................. 106

6. Index .......................................................................... 117

Abstract

Introduction:

This issue is presented in preparation for a book compiling material relevant to the etymology and early history of dude - a project which began in the early 1990's with Barry Popik's discovery of Robert Sale Hill's Jan. 14, 1883, poem, The Dude. That all-important item for the etymology of dude had surprisingly fallen almost immediately into obscurity, both for the writers of 1883 who wondered about the origin of the term and for all lexicographers and scholars prior to Popik.

Popik and I, together with the late David Shulman, published our first Comments on Etymology item on dude in 1993, and twenty years later Peter Reitan joined in by providing very valuable additional information. Our research into dude is a team effort, and our book, when it appears, will be co-authored by the three of us (Popik, Reitan, and Cohen).

The vast outpouring of 1883ff. articles/poems/cartoons on the dude brought this word into the English lexicon and finned up its position there. These numerous items also provide insight into the nature of the dude, and the present COE issue compiles what the authors have collected over the years.

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