![]() There is said to have been a Macaroni Club in Britain by 1764, composed of young men who sought to introduce elegancies of dress and bearing from the continent, which was the immediate source of this usage in English. Originally known as a leading food of Italy (especially Naples and Genoa), it was used in English by 1769 to mean "a fop, a dandy" ("typical of elegant young men" would be the sense in "Yankee Doodle") because it was an exotic dish in England at a time when certain young men who had traveled the continent were affecting French and Italian fashions and accents (and were much mocked for it). "tube-shaped food made of dried wheaten paste", 1590s, from southern Italian dialectal maccaroni (Italian maccheroni), plural of maccarone, name for a kind of pasty food made of flour, cheese, and butter, possibly from maccare "bruise, batter, crush," which is of unknown origin, or from late Greek makaria "food made from barley." "Charlie's a nice dude." Occasionally it's used as a neutral noun, so you can call someone a "strange dude." It now is used to refer positively to somebody. Īpplication to any male is recorded by 1966, U.S., originally in African-American vernacular.ĭUDE: This does not mean "tenderfoot," as it once did. But he is convinced that a person caught in the act of wearing a white linen collar, and who looks as though he might have recently shaved or washed his face, must be a dude, true and proper. Not that he has ever seen the true prototype of a class that was erstwhile so numerous among us. Now, "tenderfoot" is not to be construed as the Western equivalent of that much evolved and more abused specimen of mankind, familiarly styled "dude." For even the Montana cowboy recognizes the latter. merely one of the spontaneous products of popular slang". "The term has no antecedent record, and is prob. The vogue word of 1883, originally used in reference to the devotees of the "aesthetic" craze, later applied to city slickers, especially Easterners vacationing in the West (as in dude ranch "ranch which entertains guests and tourists for pay," attested by 1921). 1883, "fastidious man," New York City slang of unknown origin recent research suggests it is a shortening of Yankee Doodle, based on the song's notion of "foppish, over-fastidious male" (compare macaroni). ![]()
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