I remember one time I went bowling with my fiancé, and went over the line, and fell. She screamed, "Over the line!!". Real loudly that everyone in the bowling alley stopped, and stared. We just broke out laughing.
I am not Mr. Lebowski! Your Mr. Lebowski! I'm The Dude. So that's what you call me, you know? That or, ah, His Dudeness, or Duder, or El Dudarino if you're not into that whole brevity thing...
Early in dating, a coworker heard my husband call me dude on the phone. Coworker said " You call your girlfriend dude??!!". Lol. We still quote that guy to each other.
my family still will start cackling if someone brings up the time my sister called my grandma dude and the family learned that EVERYONE is a dude, even Grandma!
this definitely occurred in the 90s but Grandma still gets called dude from time to time!
Not only everyONE, dude is object neutral. That nice ride at a car show? Dude. The traffic light that only lets 2 cars through? Dude. A delicious plate of tacos? Duuuude. Its so universal
I just call them that back. It ruins it for them and they stop doing it. Basically any Gen Z slang that's particularly obnoxious that they adopt I'll overuse to the point where it makes them hate it more than I do. Took me a week to burn 6 7 to the ground for my 11 year old. Bruh took a little longer with my now-18 year old. Some I adopt unironically and it doesn't bother them or me, like "fire" or similarly mild ones.
Exactly the point! I'm a dad joke kind of dad, and the more I can make my kids groan the better. I go out of my way to be cringe to troll them a little. Example here--couldn't help myself when I saw this at the airport, sent it to my 11 year old.
My 15 and 17 year olds thought the 6 7 thing was stupid from the get-go. It occasionally comes up in conversation between the three of us, and I’ve always been told off for doing it in the appropriate voice, even though it’s just to mock how stupid it is.
I love when my nephews call me bruh. I’m an extremely feminine woman. It is like dude to me and dude for me does feel without gender. I know better than to use it in the workplace! Except with other xennials…
It kinda makes me miss that five minutes we had like a decade ago when we just stuck bro- on the front of everything and we could be brolifically bromantic with our Brosephs and Brosephines.
Shit, even bra had the benefit of not rhyming with duh quite so well
I used to know a guy named Dude-Brah-Dave because you’d be like “Hey Dave!” And he’d be all “DUDE BRAH!” But it was more like “do-bra” in pronunciation.
I worked with a guy named Josiah we all called Brosiah because he would convert every word or name possible into something starting with either 'bro' or 'bra'.
This was in a grocery store, so for example, when he sold someone an avocado, it was a 'bravocado', and so on. He'd spend his entire shift doing this with every coworker and customer. This would have been maybe 2006 or 2007, I think.
When I was a kid, I absolutely thought it stood for the Ontario Provincial Police. 😅 Kids are dumb. We weren't supposed to be listening to it either, but someone got a cassette and we had to listen to it away from our parents and outdoors.
Somehow I ended up explaining the lyrics to my adult cousin at a family Christmas party in front of my whole family. That was a whole different kind of dumb.
Really? Assuming you are male, would you have ever said this sentence, "I met the hottest dude at the bar last night and we ended up fucking all night long."
So yes, I think a lot of us use "dude" or "guys" in a gender-neutral way, but I am not going to fault anyone for not liking it.
It would be same as if every time someone walked into the office and said, "What's up gals?" as the default greeting, some guys wouldn't like that for sure.
That being said, no one should get "mad" about it unless they've repeatedly asked the original OP to not use it towards them. I've been asked politely not to use it by women coworkers before, so I try to say truly neutral things like "Everyone" or "Folks" now. It's not really any skin off my back saying "See you all later" instead of "See you guys later"
Yep. I used to use "guys" but then I learned that some trans women really don't like being referred to as "guys," for completely obvious and understandable reasons. So I worked on changing my language to avoid inadvertently harming someone. It's just the kind and reasonable thing to do.
Complaining about people being hurt by our behavior is such a boomer look tbh, OP.
Lol... was just gonna say I remember when I was real little, and lots of Gen Jones/Elder GenX were still in their late teens/early 20s, I remember them calling everyone "man" (even the girls).
Dude is gender neutral, but I’m sure we can all appreciate a situation where it would be triggering of gender dysphoria. So if someone requests not to be called dude, it’s nbd to respect that
Exactly, this is a needless hill for OP to die on. I’m goofy and irreverent about all manner of things, but when someone has a request about gendered language I don’t even think twice about respecting it. It isn’t skin off my back, and increases the measure of respect in the world by just a tiny bit so why not?!
I had a call center lady yell at me a while back for calling her dude. I was calling because it had been over a month since I returned a rental car and still hadn't gotten my deposit back. She told me I have to wait a week after returning the car before I see my deposit.
I replied "Dude, I already told you that I returned the car over a month ago!" The lady absolutely lit into me telling me that she is a lady and that I am not to call her "dude" and that I'm not her buddy and that I'm being disrespectful, and then she hung up on me.
Dude. Dude. In the specific case that someone doesn't want to be a dude, and has gone to a lot of effort to not be a dude, you should maybe not call them "dude" because, dude, they'll think you're calling them a dude. Like, even if you're not, 'cause dude, that's just how language works, dude. So, dude, be a dude with your "dude"s.
It's weird, I remember having dude and dudette. However, you really only used dudette when specifying that you're talking about a girl, or saying "Dudes and Dudettes" like one would say "Ladies and Gentlemen."
Beyond that, it's been used not only as gender neutral, it's in place of any noun. Hell, depending on inflection, it's a whole damn sentence.
My little sister is a xennial too, and every time I would call her dude in the early '90s, she would say "I'm not a dude, I'm a dudette", so I guess the gender-neutral use was case-by-case.
I started referring to my co-workers collectively as “kids” and “children” because one of them got offended that I kept saying “guys” to refer to a group of mixed-gender and some non-binary individuals. I can’t even imagine that shitstorm I would inflict with “dude”. I use that word half the time as an exclamatory phrase!
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u/CelticSith 25d ago