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For the dudes and dudettes of Jackson County By Bill Miller Sep 11, 2022 12:15 AM A A History snoopin’ in the wild can be a moderately dangerous endeavor. A few years ago, I wrote about a couple of search safaris that went way off the beaten path (“Hazards of history snooping,” Sept. 25, 2011). One was looking for a vanished bridge, and the other for a memorial monument at the top of a mountain. Both ended with a punctured tire. “Pup, whooooooooosh!” That, my friend, is the sound of a sharp piece of shale piercing your beautiful radial tire. I’ll spare you the agony. Don’t think it’s just tires. It could be mosquito bites, bee stings and, every once in a while, a dog who’s not having a good day and apparently wants to add a two-legged snooper to its diet. Not to mention, Oregon’s unofficial state flower — poison oak. Obviously, an amusing and unexpected history find without trouble is always a welcome scenario. Not long ago, while strolling through an 1883 edition of a Jacksonville newspaper, a headline caught my eye — “The just now popular word dude.” Say what? That dude? You mean like, “Yo, dude,” “He’s a cool dude,” “No way, dude”? Exactly. Now, maybe you first heard or started saying “dude” as an impressionable teenager after watching the 1982 movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Maybe you were a Jan and Dean and Beach Boys-loving surfer from the 1960s. Some may remember the dude ranch as far back as the 1930s. But 1883? No way, dude! According to some news articles of the day, the word had been used in Salem, New Hampshire, since the 1860s. But a Brooklyn newspaper story said its popularity finally exploded in New York City in February 1883. “Just where the word came from, nobody knows,” it said, “but it has sprung into popularity within the last two weeks. Now, everyone is using it.” A couple of newspapers tried to blame the English for starting it all, but the blokes in Great Britain were having none of it. The Oxford English Dictionary, known as the historical dictionary of the English language, has never taken the bait and still blames our American ancestors. “A facetious slang term,” it says, “which came into vogue in New York about the beginning of 1883.” The early newspaper definitions of the word are also amusing and quite different than the way most of us would think of a dude. “They are a harmless lot of men, for they are too shallow and weak to accomplish any harm, but they are sometimes offensive.” “A dude cannot be old; he must be young. The dude is from 19 to 28 years of age, wears trousers of extreme tightness, is hollow chested, apes the Englishman and distinguishes himself among his fellow men as a lover of actresses.” In June 1883, less than four months later, a philosophical letter writer to an Astoria newspaper speculated on what to call a female dude. “It would be absurd,” he said, “to say that there are no female dudes.” The writer quarreled with using “dudette.” “We have too many ‘ettes,’” he said. And, because “ettes” is a diminutive (defined as small), he thought dudette would be offensive to women. “We think women will agree,” he concluded, “dudess, like a princess, is the proper, and the only proper feminine word for dude.” Nobody cared. Nor did anyone care for dudine or dudee. “Dude” finally managed semi-respectability when it was published in the Century Dictionary of 1889. In pre-social-media days it usually took a lot longer than that for a slang word to reach that level of acceptance, even when almost everyone was using it or knew what it meant. So dude or dudette, that’s the end of the story. Thankfully no tires were lost in the telling. Writer Bill Miller is the author of five books, including “History Snoopin’” — a collection of his previous columns. Reach him at [email protected].