924. What if I told you that you actually should use "uh" and "um" when you're giving a talk? And what if I told you "dude" was originally an anti-masculine word? Those are just some of the surprising insights from Valerie Fridland's new book, "Like, Literally, Dude."
924. What if I told you that you actually should use "uh" and "um" when you're giving a talk? And what if I told you "dude" was originally an anti-masculine word? Those are just some of the surprising insights from Valerie Fridland's new book, "Like, Literally, Dude."
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MIGNON: Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.
We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.
And today, we have cool stuff and history because I have a special guest, Valerie Fridland.
You may recognize her name because she's been a contributor to the podcast.
She's written many of the interesting segments you've all enjoyed.
You know, why don't people say "you're welcome."
That was one of hers.
And she has a new book out called, "Like, Literally, Dude," about all the speech habits we love to hate.
And I have had this, I had the pleasure of reading this early, but it had a different title, and I have the advanced review copy.
I'm very excited.
Valerie, welcome to the podcast.
VALERIE: Thank you.
I am so excited to be here and talk to you in person, not just through the podcast.
MIGNON: I know.
To hear your voice instead of just hearing me read your words.
I have to say what I love about your book, "Like, Literally, Dude," like literally what I like about it is that, you know, I've been doing this for at least 16 years now, and I'm always kind of surprised when I'm surprised by something, and your book is just filled with cool things I didn't know.
For people watching the video, I'll hold this up.
I'm one of those monsters who writes in books.
And I wrote, "Wow" in the margin here.
More than once, that was just one that you just saw.
Just so much to learn and be excited about language.
Maybe talk a little bit before we get into the specifics of the book.
Why don't you give people sort of the big picture and background about how this book came to be and what it's about from your point of view.
VALERIE: Sure, sure.
Well, I'm what's called a sociolinguist, which means I look at theoretical aspects of linguistic structure of sentences, sounds that we make, sort of those little parts of language we often don't think about.
And I look at them from the perspective of a linguist, but also with the ideas of how does this affect who we are socially, how we're perceived socially, and how does who we are socially actually change the way we might say sounds or structure or sentences, how does that impact the language we speak.
So I give a lot of talks about linguistics around the country.
And one time, very clearly in my mind, I was giving a talk about vowels, which is something I talk about a lot, because vowels are really fascinating, going through all sorts of cool changes in American speech.
And after I got done, I had a flood of people coming to ask me questions.
And one particular person came up to me and he said, OK, I loved your talk.
It was really fascinating.
Can you please tell people to stop using "like."
Which if only I had the power to be a linguist in that way, sort of, you know, I will pronounce you a nonlike-user, but I love "like," and it got me thinking about how I just gave this talk about all the things about language that we don't understand from a prescriptive standpoint when we only learn grammar school English, that there is this whole other side to language about how it's powerful and purposeful, even if we don't love the way it sounds, that these things are natural evolutionary tendencies.
I just had finished that whole talk, and then someone came up and asked me about something else that actually had a very legitimate basis of how it came to be, and it also was the same rules and the same ideas that I had just talked about.
And I realized that people that don't study linguistics for a living or take a linguistics class from one of us probably don't have access to understanding how that is the same process as the things I was just talking about, as sort of the larger, you know, how do vowels change over time, how to syntax change its structure, so that in Old English we had really didn't have to worry about where we put different words in the sentence because they all have case endings and we don't have that anymore.
We don't think about the contemporary changes in our speech as being rule-governed, regular processes due to evolutionary forces in the same way that those other speech features that we kind of accept without question are.
And I just realized, given people the tools and sort of the English classes we take in school to answer those questions.
So this is the book about everything we love to hate, I too discovered a lot of really fun, fascinating facts.
I mean, this is that book that taught me a lot when I was doing it.
I knew the big picture stuff, and the big picture stuff is language always evolves and it evolves not just because it's a natural state of language, which it is, but because it meets fascinating social forces and social events like invasions and wars and Vikings, all sorts of fun stuff.
Teenagers and women are another big one, right?
All these things push language to its new frontiers, but there are little pieces of information about where things come from that really blew my mind.
And it was so fun.
I was so excited to write them in the book so that I could share the knowledge I had recently learned with everybody.
MIGNON: Yeah, and, like, the little details we'll get into are just fascinating too.
And I should have mentioned, I'm always so bad at introducing my guests because I get so excited that you're here.
So I should have mentioned you're a professor of English at the University of Nevada, in Reno.
And strangely, we didn't know each other when I was a journalism professor there.
Since you've been, we've become good friends over the, for somehow we started talking just when you started writing this book.
And so I got to hear along the way how it was going, which was really fun and interesting.
So the chapter that where I first wrote, "Wow," in the margin, that is chapter 2, which is about "um" and "uh."
And what just shocked me is that, you know, you can easily find a gazillion articles on the internet about how you shouldn't say "uh," you shouldn't say "um," if you want to be a good speaker, you have to eliminate those from your language.
It's, like, conventional wisdom, like, everyone agrees.
And your chapter says that these words serve, like, incredibly important linguistic purpose in conversation.
So let's just, like, rejigger how people are thinking about—
VALERIE: Absolutely, that was actually one of the chapters that I knew again, the broad strokes.
I had had students that would study "um" and "uh," and we'd look at it from a linguistic perspective.
So I knew some of the generalities about it, but as I got into researching it, it kind of blew my mind.
And so I decided I had to name that chapter "Um Loved" because it really summed up the fact that we hate this thing.
Nobody ever says, "Add more ums and uhs" into your speech.
Never, never.
But yet they are unbelievably and undeniably useful in many ways.
We don't understand the purposes they serve for us.
So the, and I had to illustrate one there.
Now we're-- (indistinct) - I know.
MIGNON: I feel very self-conscious.
VALERIE: It's really fascinating was that there wasn't just one aspect that was good and it wasn't just for speakers that it was good.
It's also incredibly helpful for listeners as well.
So let's unpack just sort of for the speakers a little bit of what we found in the book and what we can learn in the book.
First of all, there are two different main views as to what they do for us as speakers.
And this follows a long line of research that started in the middle of the 20th century with psychologists mainly.
So psychologists were thinking, okay, "ums" seem to be these sort of nervous ticks. They're tied to this whole other area of disfluency, which includes things like repetitions and false starts and stuttering, those kinds of things.
And they did an experiment where they would increase the anxiety of subjects.
So they, which sounds lovely, but what they really did was they had people take tests to determine how anxious they were.
And then they would put them in situations like public speaking that make you more anxious.
They tried to study how much these various disfluencies increased.
And what they found was while these other disfluencies, so things like false starts and repetitions, did increase, the more anxious speakers became, "um"s and "uh"s actually decreased.
So it's not about being anxious, which is really funny, because a lot of us—
MIGNON: So it's not about being anxious.
VALERIE: I think that's when it happens is when we're nervous.
And I think that's because we often see it as something that happens when we're giving presentations or when we're talking in class or when we're talking in a meeting.
And it seems like that's anxiousness, but actually what happens is we find that instead, "um"s and "uh"s tend to occur when we're doing really hard cognitive lifting, which means when we're processing things and we're doing really difficult cognitive processing, the "um"s and "uh"s come in to kind of give us a cognitive processing moment.
So they tend to occur when we're about to engage in conversations with more complex syntactic structures when we form our sentences.
So, you know, a lot of times they'll start at the beginning of a sentence because that's a really long syntactic structure you're constructing and it takes your brain a minute to get all the different parts together.
Or when you're stopping in the middle of speech to add a more complex embedded phrase, sort of giving more information to somebody.
Again, your brain is doing some heavy lifting there, trying to construct that syntactic structure.
MIGNON: So why don't we just pause though to just take time to think?
VALERIE: Well, that would make sense, right?
So why don't you just pause since people don't like "um"s and "uh"s?
But it's because it also serves a secondary important function, which is it acts as a signal to listeners that you need a second to finish constructing your thought, but you're not done.
Because a silent pause is part of a complex of what we call turn transition cues, which which means it's kind of a signal we can give to someone that we're ready for them to take over talking.
So if I'm in the middle of saying something and then I just stop talking, which I might think of as a pause, you might think of it as, "Oh, they're done talking."
I mean, which probably means you weren't listening very well to what I was saying because obviously you would know I wasn't done.
But what we find is people do sometimes jump in at that moment, but if you "um" or "uh," it signals to them, and it does seem to be pretty effective in that regard that I'm not done talking, I'm going to talk more, which is why we don't "um" and "uh," often, for example, when we're talking to a computer, because we know it's not going to be that.
MIGNON: Oh my gosh.
So when we're talking to a computer, like when we're talking to Siri or something like that, people say, "uh," or, "um," less because they aren't expecting to be interrupted.
VALERIE: Exactly.
MIGNON: Oh, that's amazing.
VALERIE: As well, when you're telling stories or giving a lecture, because those are contexts where we expect a good listener to know not to interrupt us.
But when we're just having conversations, it doesn't seem to be the case and it needs to be there to signal, wait a minute, hold on.
And then there's actually the fascinating research on why we "um" versus "uh," which is tied to listenership as well, which is something I hadn't known until I started researching the book is there is a difference in "um" and "uh" because if you think about it, why would we need synonyms for a filled pause?
That seems a little odd, right?
If you look universally, almost all languages or all languages study do have filled pauses and even more exciting, they both have, they all have two pauses at least many have more than that, but at least two different forms, which suggests there's something intentional about that.
And it does seem to be that it's not just signaling that you need to pause, it's also signaling how long a pause you're going to take.
So when you, "uh," your listener knows, okay, well, I'll just give them a sec.
But when you, "um," they think, oh, I have time to go get a sandwich because, "um," a larger or longer pause.
And when you look at studies of spontaneous speech collections, they find that that is in fact, what happens that people "uh" when they are only going to take a short pause and "uh" when they're taking a longer one.
MIGNON: Um, so let's talk about how it helps listeners then.
How does it, so these words, they're cues to listeners, right?
And it, your books, like it increases comprehension.
VALERIE: It does, which I love.
I mean, that tells me that I'm going to, I'm in a lot next time I give a lecture to my students at key points because what we found in research is not only does I'm in work as a signal of delay, so it signals to a listener, "I'm going to take a minute."
It also seems to signal to them a cognitive flag.
So it suggests there's new or important information coming up because we do notice that people before low frequency words, before heavier cognitive tasks.
So to a listener, when they hear an "um" or "uh," what it does is said, "Okay, heighten my attention to what they're about to say because it's got to be either new information, unexpected information or difficult information to process.
So it seems like it encourages listeners to devote a little more processing effort to what is about to be said.
And the end result of that is that we are faster with our reaction time.
So we can recognize objects, if people are calling them out, if an "um" or "uh" goes before them faster than when they don't have "um" and "uh."
It also helps us recognize what they're about to say and remember it later.
So in a pop test, for example, of some of these studies, they'll have researchers give instructions in the first part of the test.
And then about an hour later, they'll give them a surprise memory test.
And when the researcher said an "um" or an "uh" before a word in their instructions, the subjects an hour later remembered that word better than in a separate experiment where they said the same word without that "um" or "uh."
So it seems very effective both as a tool for a speaker and a tool for a listener.
MIGNON: That is just amazing.
That is amazing.
There was a professor in my department.
She guest lectured in my class once.
And every once in a while she would say, "Write this down!"
And I thought, wow, that's brilliant.
That's just very specific.
And all the students perked up.
But maybe the "uh" and the "um" are slightly more subtle.
Because you can't say, "Write this down!" every two minutes.
VALERIE: Or if you think about it, when you're in a context like work or you're giving a presentation, it now makes sense that it's not actually anxiety, but it's because when you're in those contexts, you're using less familiar words, you're using less frequent words, you're building more impressive sentences 'cause you wanna impress the boss, or you're in a context in which those kinds of sentences tend to be.
I mean, think about supply chain logistics, for example, versus transportation, right.
That's obviously, now we are familiar with that word, but in workplaces, that would be a much more common word to use, but not common in daily life.
So those are actually not nervous ticks to use an, it just signals, this is a word I don't use as often, And so it takes a little more cognitive effort to kind of bring it up and spit it out.
So it's really just a sign that someone's doing hard work for you when you're having a lot of "um"s and "uh"s.
MIGNON: Yeah, I thought it was fascinating that when they looked at lectures in the humanities and lectures in the hard sciences, that the humanities lectures used "uh" and "um" more often.
And I think the theory was that the language, the terms are more defined in the hard sciences.
If you're talking about the Krebs cycle in biology, you're always gonna use the same words.
Where if you're talking about "War and Peace" in an English class, you have a much broader range of words and phrases that you can use to talk about that concept.
So that humanities professors are using, are working harder to choose specific words when they're speaking.
And so they were more likely to use an "um," and that was also too fascinating.
VALERIE: I love that study.
As a humanities professor, it kind of gives validation to my belief that scientists are at a loss for words.
MIGNON: (laughs) I've been both and it's just, they are very different, and it is true that one of the things I liked about the sciences is that there was always a right answer to every question.
Whereas in English, you could always make a paper ....
VALERIE: Absolutely, and there are so many words and descriptors that you tend to use in an English class than you would in a hard science class.
I mean, there's only so many different ways you can look at E equals MC squared.
But in English, if you're talking about, you know, some sort of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" or something like that, there are going to be a lot of different ways you can describe that, a lot of different angles to talk about.
And when they actually did a follow-up study looking at the vocabulary size, from looking at newspapers in each area, so humanities journals and periodicals and science periodicals and journals, as well as lectures in both, they actually did find a substantive and significant difference in the amount of vocabulary in humanities versus hard scientists that they would use.
So it does seem to pinpoint this difference of the number of vocabulary words, the frequency with which they're used, and sort of the general difference in the size of your discussions in terms of how many words you use.
MIGNON: Okay.
Wonderful.
Well, we're talking about the book, "Like, Literally, Dude," by Valerie Fridland.
We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about the word "dude."
Well, welcome back.
Now we are going to talk about one of my favorite words, "dude."
I had a dog named Dude.
Dude was a girl.
My first book was dedicated to my husband and my dog, Pat and Dude.
She was by my feet the whole time I wrote the book.
And I was just excited and thrilled to learn about the history of this word and its important social meaning.
So Valerie, take it away.
Tell us about. Dude, tell us about Dude.
VALERIE: The first love that you had a dog named Dude, and that it was a female dog named Dude, because I think now we do see more omnipresence of female dudes, but that's a fairly recent happening.
So it sounds like Dude was kind of early on that trend.
So I guess that makes you a trendsetter.
MIGNON: (laughs) - Well, you know, it's all the time in, right in language.
It is a very true versus falling to ???linguistic evolution more generally.
But Dude actually, sorry, go ahead.
MIGNON: Dude was a bull master.
And such a very big, very lazy, laid on the couch, very chill dog.
VALERIE: That's a perfect name.
So she just seemed like a dude.
MIGNON: Yes.
VALERIE: So that's actually really interesting because it seems like a dude.
And so the idea that that kind of tells me about what you're thinking about the meaning of "dude" is sort of this chill, laid back, cool, tough looking kind of dog.
And now it was sort of unusual that it was a female dog because we often seem to associate dudes with masculinity as well in our contemporary culture.
What I found really fascinating when I was researching the history of the "dude," and it was inspired because my son, who was probably eight or nine at the time, he started "dooding" me, used "dude" all the time.
And I could not understand, I mean, I was "dude" to him even, what he was using it for.
So I thought, well, I'm a linguist, so I have tools.
I might as well use them and learn about "dude."
And when I looked back into the history of "dude," I had to laugh because I thought, my son was too young for me to explain the significance of this, but if I told him now that "dude" was actually an effeminate dandy in the 19th century, I think it would have maybe changed the way he looked at using "dude" for everybody.
But if we look back in time, essentially that was a massive difference.
At the turn of the century, at the end of the 1800s, what we find is there was a big change in the sort of culture of the time and in norms for masculinity.
So it was kind of setting people on edge, this sort of massive shift in societal norms and the sanctity of the family, it was feared was falling apart because of women's suffrage for one thing, which had sort of upended these ideas of what was a man's role versus what was a woman's role.
MIGNON: God forbid we vote.
VALERIE: (laughing) I know, exactly.
You're right, and it was, also the fact that there was an increasing visibility of alternative norms for masculinity, namely homosexuality was starting to become a little more visible at that time.
So here you have women asking for the vote and men asking to be able to also defy the traditional behaviors of men.
So that really sets society up on edge.
And so dudes were at this time, men that were very fastidiously dressed with this sort of ostentatious sense of fashion.
They were also very oriented towards the aesthetics movement at the time, which was art for art's sake, I think it's the most famous line from that movement.
And that was really that we could look at beauty superficially and take value from that, but it had sort of come on the heels of this idea that art had to reflect deepness, and it had to reflect your inner psyche, and it had to be about sort of deeper state than beauty and sort of just lightness.
And that was a shift towards this idea that no, things could just be beautiful, and you could just appreciate them for their beauty, and you only had to live for the lightness of life.
You didn't have to go and work for a living, and you didn't have to care about other people.
It was sort of this whole shift in mentality that was taking over this new breed of young American male where they were dressing, and these were wealthy men, not poor men generally, but they were dressing very ostentatiously.
They were overly concerned with the way they were, their comportment and the way they were sort of showing off.
They would wear sort of pointed-toed shoes, and they would put little dots on their heads, and they'd put powdered wigs on.
And they really didn't do much to push culture forward.
And so they became something widely mocked.
And also, you talked about in ridicule.
And in fact, in the late 1800s—yeah, 1880s or so, it was the equivalent of water-cooler gossip at the time to talk about who was a dude and who wasn't in a way.
And even in poetry, so we see a lot of poems about dudes coming up in the newspaper.
I think you have an example of that.
MIGNON: Coincidentally, yesterday, Ryan Cordell, who is someone I follow on Mastodon, he's an associate professor of information sciences and English at the University of Illinois.
And he teaches letterpress classes and he looks at 19th century newspapers, and he posted this amazing, it almost looks like ASCII art in a newspaper that is a poem called "The Dude," and it's printed in the shape of a man.
Like the letters are like ASCII art of a man, but it's this poem called "A Dude," and it's very insulting.
It's not a good thing.
The dude was not well-loved, it appears in the late 1800s.
VALERIE: No, other than his duds, there was not much to like about a dude at that period.
And what's interesting is in addition to this mockery and ridicule, which was pretty intense.
In fact, there are a number of articles in the New York Times from that era, from the 1880s, that talk about duels inspired by dudeism.
So by calling someone a dude, that would often get them to challenge you to a duel.
And there was actually a funny article in the New York Times, I think it was 1884, that was saying, well, that was the deciding factor because a real dude wouldn't have met you with a duel in response because they're too weak and demeanor and too flighty to ever have the masculinity and sort of a fortification to challenge someone to a duel.
So it was the fact that someone was willing to engage in a duel that made them not a dude, but it clearly was something very much on people's minds because they were so uneasy with the norms of masculinity being upturned by these new things.
And in fact, if you look at political lampooning at that time in the 1880s, a lot of times to accuse your opponent of dudism could actually cause them not to win an election.
So it was pretty amazing, the power of the dude at that time, but it was a completely different power than the type of power dude has now.
MIGNON: Wild.
And then the other thing that was so surprising to me is that "Yankee Doodle Dandy," this song, it brought dudeism forward in the culture.
Talk about how that.
VALERIE: Well, that's what's so fascinating is that "Yankee Doodle Dandy" seems to be the origin of the dude.
And we tend to think of the dude as maybe indicative of duds.
So a lot of times, one thing we find that has always been part of the dude's personality.
And really, I think the thing that has been the through line from the 1800s to today is some sort of focus on their duds.
So in the 1800s, it was a focus on sort of ostentatious, overly showy dress.
In contemporary times, it sort of slacker rags kind of thing.
So it's a different kind of duds.
But a lot of people thought that's the root of the word.
But actually, it was etymologists studied all sorts of newspapers to try to find where they first found that it were mentioned.
And they actually found an article from I think it was clothing and for clothing, clothier and furnishings or something like that.
It was a really funny newspaper that in the 1883 talked about the origin of dude being from "Yankee Doodle Dandy," where "doodle" and "dandy" got fused together to become "doody," which then got shortened to "dude," because it was actually a put down that the British soldiers would call out to the Americans during the Revolutionary War, because they were sort of ragtagged and disheveled.
So they were called Yankee doodle dandies, because they were trying to be dandies, like overseas British dandies, but they were so miserable in their attempts that they were Yankee doodle dandy, which was basically making fun.
And what, you know, if you think about the words of "Yankee Doodle Dandy," which now you probably have running through your head since we brought it up.
Think about how "Yankee Doodle Dandy" sticks, takes a feather and sticks it in his cap and calls it macaroni, which I remember as a kid thinking of those little macaronis that, you know, you made jewelry with or you ate.
Remember those painted jewelry things you would make and necklaces.
MIGNON: Yeah.
VALERIE: I was always wondering why macaroni had anything to do with "Yankee Doodle Dandy," but, you know, at five, who cares.
It turns out that it actually was a reference to, in the 18th century, to sort of British affected youth who had continental European heirs and acted like dandies and really loved to eat the signature Italian dish of macaroni.
So they got the nickname "macaronis."
And so basically, in "Yankee Doodle Dandy," it's a reference to Americans trying but failing at putting on continental European airs like the macaronis by sticking a feather in their hats.
MIGNON: Oh, wow.
And it's still about the clothes because they put the feather in their hats.
VALERIE: That's the through line that we see.
But as actually as the war tide turned, American soldiers started singing it back to the British, at least that's alleged.
And that's how it sort of became this very big song of Americana is as we started to win the Revolutionary War, it became almost something to throw back in the British face.
But it was what the birthplace of the dude really seems to be.
MIGNON: So is that where dude turned to the corner and started to be a more positive thing.
I mean, I think of it as a positive thing, right?
I mean, now I think people do think of, I mean, no one doesn't mind being called a dude.
VALERIE: It's sort of, we talk about our friends as dudes, We often have articles, I think the Rolling Stone did a whole spread called the Decade of the Dude.
It's not a bad thing to be today, but I would say no.
It didn't really turn around until about the 1930s or '40s.
Between the time of being a dude that was sort of a dandy and the dude that became a little more cool, you actually see a change in use of the word that still referred to clothes.
But instead of being sort of a pretentious dandy, it came to mean any overdressed outsider, which is where where the modern word "dude ranch" comes from, because it often met urban city slickers that dressed as cowboys and tried to go play at being a cowboy as they went west.
Because this was sort of when the west was really starting to be expansive in the American imaginary.
So New Yorkers who dress up in their cowboy duds and go west were called dudes, which is why you often see caricatures of dudes in old Western cowboy movies.
So it really still wasn't positive, though, but it was less pejorative.
And it really had lost that effeminate kind of connotation to be more just about an overdressed outsider, someone with a new uniform or overdressed for whatever context they were in.
That meaning, that sort of spanky outfit meaning, got picked up by the zoot suitors in the 1930s and '40s.
So you had African-Americans and Mexican-American pachuchos who were, you know, defying cultural norms and expectations in a way that was considered very subversive and rebellious at the time, even though that actually wasn't their intention, they refused to give up this dress that was considered a subversive dress and it was outlawed in fact.
And by adopting that, they faced significant cultural prejudice, not only because of their ethnicity, but also because of their refusal to stop dressing in that fashion.
So they actually adopted that term as a sort of call-out to other dudes who shared that same cultural prejudice, but yet stood up for it and embraced in the sort of figurative brotherhood of the snappy dresser, the zoot suitor.
MIGNON: So that's really where it turned that corner.
VALERIE: Yes, yes.
MIGNON: And that's when it started to be cool, of course.
VALERIE: And then of course it popped up in the more slacker subcultures.
And whenever you get that sort of cool subculture association to something, young men more generally tend to get very attracted to that because that's sort of part of what our cultural model of being a man is about.
To young men, it's about sort of being edgy and counterculture.
And so once it became part of zoot-suit culture, and then it got adopted by surfer and druggie subculture, and then it became cool to be a dude.
And slowly it became not about your clothes, but about the lifestyle and about being sort of chill and laid back and non-conformist, but in a way that had camaraderie and solidarity signaled to other people that were also dudes.
MIGNON: And it's amazing that it can mean so many different things now.
VALERIE: Oh my gosh, so many, yes, yes.
You can "dude" someone and mean a ton of different things.
And in fact, I don't know if you've ever seen that Bud Light commercial where all that said in all the different scenes is "dude," but it means something different in each scene.
So it's a young man and in one scene, he's on the couch with his girlfriend, and he puts his arm around her, and one of his roommates comes and sits down.
He's like, "Dude, dude."
Meaning get lost, right?
And then another time he's trying to catch a ball and he's like, "Dude, dude, dude!"
Meaning throw it to me.
And then, I think there's another scene where someone's expressing something that was hard, it looks like they're upset.
He's like, "Dude."
And then another scene, someone's doing something irritating.
He's like, "Dude!"
So what that tells us is "dude" has taken on a meaning far beyond, hey man, or hey brother.
It also means all these different things.
It can be a greeting, a sign off, commiseration, or a way to sort of preface and mitigate disapproval, or sort of a contradiction of a friendship, like you're going to tell them not to eat your pizza, that they need to do laundry or whatever, you can use that as sort of a preface to soften a blow of disapproval or some sort of infraction that you think they've done.
So it has all these meanings that have evolved from this one simple word.
And it's pretty amazing to me how expansive in our vocabularies become.
MIGNON: Yeah, that's fun.
Well, Valerie, thank you so much.
We have just barely touched on all the cool things that are in this book, the fascinating details.
You all should just go run out and buy it and you won't be disappointed.
It's called "Like, Literally, Dude" by Valerie Fridland.
It's out, you know, it'll be out just for a few days when you hear this podcast or watch the video.
So rush out and get it so you can be the first to read it.
And Valerie, where can people find you online.
VALERIE: Oh, well, they can go, of course, to your website and anything I've written and hear you talk about things I've written about, which is I love, I love that.
And they can also find me on "Psychology Today" where I write a blog every month called "Language in the Wild" or just look me up at my website, ValerieFridland.com.
Any of those places.
MIGNON: Thank you so much.