Thursday December 09, 2004

On Language

The origins of hip and the uses of dude. From the latter (via MeFi):

Dude is clearly used most by young, European-American men, and thus also likely indexes membership in this identity category, but by closely investigating women’s use of the term, the separation between the first-order stance index (cool solidarity) and the second-order groupidentity index (man) becomes evident. These data also suggest, as would be intuitively predicted by anyone living in North American Anglo culture, that there is an indexical connection between the stance of cool solidarity and that of young Anglo masculinity, and thus an indirect indexical connection, of the kind outlined by Ochs (1992), between dude and masculinity.