http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/12/08/dude.study.ap/index.html
Re: Dude!!!
It’s good to see that the linguistics department can get something published here at pitt, even if it is on the origins of the word dude.
Re: Re: Dude!!!
What, these aren’t worthy of note?
“Some effects of first language and working memory on the processing of wh-movement in English as a second language.”
“The Phonology and Phonetics of Jamaican Creole Reduplication.”
“Explaining the ‘natural order of L2 morpheme acquisition’ in English: A meta-analysis of multiple determinants.”
George Carlin did a wonderful study of the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” on his album “Class Clown”
He illustrated many uses of the words fk and st in common speech. This definitely deserves further study. Has anyone come across an academic publication on this?
As an aside (and a broad, sweeping generalization), isn’t this a great illustration of the fact that America is a country full of people who are incredibly bored? I mean, c’mon, this guy’s got a post-graduate degree and he’s spending hundreds of man-hours studying the word “dude”? Whoa.
I was a linguistics major in college and I can assure you that these words and their usage have been studied academically. One particularly amusing class I had dealt with the “infix” which is like a prefix or suffix, but is placed within a word and is much less common. The word fck is often infixed as in outfckingrageous.
The radio station WFMU periodically runs a comical public service announcement dealing with the various parts of speech f*ck is used as. I can’t find a clip of it on their site, sadly.
And as a further aside, if you want to know where Carlin got his stuff, you need to go back to Lenny Bruce. (I don’t know who his influences were.)
Academia is full of this kind of thing. Dozens of thousands of papers and dissertations are published every year on topics more serious but which have way less impact. If you want to see a great movie which partly deals with this subject set Wit starring Emma Thompson. It’s about an academic dying of cancer and truly very moving and sad, but a major theme running through it is the use of commas, punctuation very dear to my heart as many here can attest, in the poetry of John Donne. (It was made for TV, but you can rent it at Blockbuster so it must be fairly widely available. And it’s very good.)
And there you have it. Just look at how seriously I’ve taken your tongue in cheek aside. 