Remember the movie The Big Lebowski from over 25 years ago? It’s a strange film — a comedy that seems to be about a kidnapping, but is also about a case of mistaken identity, as well as being about bowling and…well, some other stuff. The movie was written, directed, and produced by Joel and Ethan Coen (“the Coen Brothers”), and Joel Coen explained the ridiculously complicated storyline this way “[the film] deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery, as well as having a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.” The Big Lebowski has attracted a cult following and even inspired a religion (Dudeism, or the Church of the Latter-Day Dude). But the main item of interest here is that the main character, played by Jeff Bridges, goes by the name The Dude. The character was inspired by a real person, Jeff Down, who also called himself The Dude. The word “Dude” has a history that seems like it comes right out of The Big Lebowski, whose plot requires nine paragraphs just to summarize.
“Dude” (the word) first appeared in the US in 1883. Its debut was noted by at least one newspaper of the time, the Brooklyn Eagle, on Feb 25:
“It is d-u-d-e or d-o-o-d, the spelling not having been distinctly settled yet. Nobody knows where the word came from, but it has sprung into popularity within the past two weeks, and everybody is using it… The word “dude” is a valuable addition to the slang of the day.”
Note that “dude” appeared in the paper apparently about two weeks after it appeared. And it got more immediate attention in the press the very next month with a long explanation in The New York Evening Post. By coincidence, the following appeared in March, which saw the opening of The Big Lebowski a mere 125 years later:
“A dude is a young man, not over twenty-five, who may be seen on Fifth Avenue between the hours of three and six, and may be recognized by the following distinguished marks and signs. He is dressed in clothes which are not calculated to attract much attention, because they are fashionable without being ostentatious. It is, in fact, only to the close observer that the completeness and care of the costume of the dude reveals itself. His trousers are very tight; his shirt-collar, which must be clerical in cut, encircles his neck so as to suggest that a sudden motion of the head in any direction will cause pain; he wears a tall black hat, pointed shoes, and a cane (not a “stick”), which should, we believe, properly have a silver handle, is carried by him under his right arm, (projecting forward at an acute angle, somewhat in the manner that a sword is carried by a general at a review, but with a civilian mildness that never suggests a military origin for the custom). When the dude takes off his hat, or when he is seen in the evening at the theatre, it appears that he parts his hair in the middle and “bangs” it. There is believed to be a difference of opinion among dudes as to whether they ought to wear white gaiters.”
The article went on at some length and pointed out that “dudes” were serious-minded and wanted to give an impression of protesting against fashion, although they were also described as being somewhat dull-witted and lacked ideas of their own (this would also describe The Dude).
Dudes continued to get lots of coverage in the press. There were additional articles in the Brooklyn Eagle, and more in papers like the Daily Northwestern, the Richwood Gazette, and the Canadian journals Prince Albert Times and Manitobe Daily Free Press. The degree of coverage itself began to receive coverage; the Atlanta Constitution ran an article saying “…most every newspaper in the country has written editorials on [the dude]…”
“Dude” was just as big a craze in England as in the US, and there was some dispute about whether the term had originated there — but so far, at least, it’s been settled by the original Brooklyn Eagle article of 1883, which predates any appearance of the term in England (at least in print). But either way, nobody is sure how the term originated. It might be linked to the word “duds,” which meant clothes. Since “duds” at the time was still in use, particularly for ragged clothes, “dude” might have been a sarcastic version of that applied to fashionable young men who were very carefully using fashion to try their best to show their disinterest in fashion.
In his first scene in The Big Lebowski, by the way, The Dude wears a tattered bathrobe to the grocery store. The Dude is not a dude.
