Community language and the semantics of offense

Linguists and online liberals have sharply different ideas about how language works.

Over the past few days I’ve had some exchanges about offensive language that revealed a sharp philosophical disagreement I did not expect. The debate revolved around the proper and improper use of the word “dude.” Here is my accounting of the two sides:

1. Dude is a genderless word and thus may be used to refer to men or women.

2. Dude can be understood as masculine and therefore can be offensive to use with reference to women, and trans women in particular.

This was online, which meant that the debate was predictably wide-ranging, often frivolous, and occasionally misleading — so I will not try to litigate all of the subcontroversies here. I do, however, think that some background is probably in order.

As a matter of etymological fact the history of “dude” is straightforward. It originally meant something like “sharp-dresser” in the late 1800s, became popularized among minority groups in the 1930s, and by the 1980s it had adopted its modern associations with drug and (particularly) surfer culture. Though dude is often used with a masculine connotation, the word seems to have generalized over the years into a genderless form:¹