Diablevert

Surprisingly, Jeff Bridges Does Not Appear Anywhere in This Post

The problem with conducting so much of our modern commmunication in short bursts of text is that you can often come off cold when you intend to be funny. It is for this reason that the wretched smily face was invented and continues to be resorted to, despite making all right-thinking adults feel like a bit like a 13-year-old-girl who makes hearts of her i-dots.

The other day, for instance, I was texting and aquaintance. They had apologized for some perceived fault on their part, and I was about to text back, "Didn't even notice." But I began to fret that this would come off as brusque. So, I thought for a minute and texted, "Didn't even notice, dude." The dude, she was all-important, a friendly little tagalong that marked the difference between a cold snub and the airy dismissal of a trifle between friends.

Now, if I close my eyes and listen intently, I can hear my father laughing at me across the pond. Whenever, in his presence, I am carried away by the tide of the conversation and use "dude," the way I would among my friends, he invariably teases me, replying in his best mock-surfer accent and tacking "dude" onto the end of every sentence. I worry that he's right, that "dude" is in essence like "groovy," the type of slang conveys its user's age more clearly than their birth certificate.

But that's kind of the thing I was thinking about the other day, after sending my that text; "dude" doesn't really convey anything, the way I, and many people my age, use it. Or rather, it's not that it doesn't convey anything, but that it can convey everything. It carries no meaning of its own. "Dude"'s like a drinking glass, a clear vessel which can contain many fluid meanings, and takes its color from them. It exists in order to convey emotion, while itself describing nothing.

Take this post, wherein I pasted verbatim an IM conversation my friend D. (The Editor of Fresno Famous) and I had while watching game six of the Red-Sox Yankees American League Championship Series. A snippet is excerpted below:

FresnoFamous: dude!
Diablevert: dude, you have no idea
FresnoFamous: wow
Diablevert: they are trying to kill me
FresnoFamous: naaaah
Diablevert: well, true, it's not directed at me specifically. they are trying to kill us all.
FresnoFamous: they're gonna win
Diablevert: dude
FresnoFamous: jesus
Diablevert: dude, you can't even...oh, dude.
FresnoFamous: dude jesus
Diablevert: oh, my god. oh, holy jesus.
FresnoFamous: wow
Diablevert: dude.
FresnoFamous: congrats man

And now, with the dudes translated:

FresnoFamous: [Hail, Friend. The intensity of this televised sporting event is arresting and stirring.]
Diablevert: [my friend, as a fan of the team from birth, for me the intensity of the experience is at a level of which], you have no idea
FresnoFamous: wow
Diablevert: they are trying to kill me
FresnoFamous: naaaah
Diablevert: well, true, it's not directed at me specifically. they are trying to kill us all.
FresnoFamous: they're gonna win
Diablevert: [please, do not speak so, lest you jinx them]
FresnoFamous: jesus
Diablevert: [my friend], you can't even...oh, [it is enough that you should know that I am overcome with relief].
FresnoFamous: [the amosphere is electric with tension, so much so that only blasphemy can give vent to my emotions] jesus
Diablevert: oh, my god. oh, holy jesus.
FresnoFamous: wow
Diablevert: [I am replete with the satisfaction of victory.]
FresnoFamous: congrats man

I wonder if there's a word to describe this phenomenon, that of a word which exists only to convey an emotion. I wonder too if such words exist in other languages. I asked my friend DDK the linguistics grad student if there was a term for such things, but he seemed not to think so; he seemed to think merely that it was a kind of exclamation.

I suppose in many ways it is like an exclamation, but most exclamations are tied to specific emotions (or sensations)---Surprise (Oh!), Pain (Ouch!), Discovery (Ah!), Pondering (Hmmmm...), Delectability (Mmmm-mmmm), Acknowledgment (Uh-huh.), Counfoundedness (Huh.), Irritation (Hey!, or in British, Oi!)

It is interesting to note that any given curse word can be substituted in any of the examples above, either to add a suggestion of vexation or simply to add force.

Dude.