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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Thursday, June 29, 2006
Dude, Where's My Irony?
More than a decade ago, I interviewed a British TV presenter called Mark Lamarr. Lamarr is known by his coiffed 50's style hair and thick Cockney voice, but he confided to me that the latter, at least, was fake. Or rather, it was a joke that had spun out of control. Lamarr, brought up in the posh Home Counties, loved to take the piss out of his London friends with what he called a cartoon Cockney accent. But he spent so much time doing this that his brain adjusted, and Lamarr found to his horror that he couldn't speak in anything but cartoon Cockney. How foolish, I thought. I'll never fall into that trap.
Yet here I am, six years into living in California, and that is exactly the trap I've fallen into -- specifically in my use of the word "dude." At first I used it ironically, alongside "totally" and "sweet" and "trip out" and other easy targets of the West Coast tongue. It got a good response from the natives, who love to hear themselves gently mocked by an English accent. But after many years of mockery, I began to appreciate the way the word crosses all barriers of gender, class and race -- it's my generation's "comrade" without the Soviet overtones -- as well as the way that it can convey so many emotions with tiny differences in intonation: respect (dude!), disbelief (dude?), amazement (dood!) impatience (duu-ude!) and awe (duuuuuuuude).
Then there's the increasing dudneness of entertainment over the last forty years or so. Sean Penn, Bill and Ted, the Big Lebowski, Ashton Kushter, Michael Moore and Michael Dell have all played a part in the dude revolution. But for me the tipping point came less than a month ago, when I watched Easy Rider for the first time (dude, I know, I know) and witnessed this exchange between Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson:
JN: What's dude? Is that like dude ranch?
PF: Dude means nice guy. Dude means regular sort of person.
Nowhere else in the panoply of pop culture, so far as I've seen, has the word actually been definied. In this light, dude becomes a synonym for mensch.
And there's much, much more in the venerable yet mysterious etymology of dude. It may have derived from "doodle," as in Yankee Doodle Dandy, but the first time we see it take off is in the 1880s, when New Yorkers used it to refer to dandys, sharp dressers and aesthetes. Oscar Wilde would have been the quintessential dude -- another point in its favor.
Somehow the word traveled West, possibly via the dude ranch (where those New York dandys went to play at being cowboys). It was being used in Westerns as early as 1933, according to this surprisingly comprehensive Wikipedia entry. And then somehow California surfers picked it up. How? this essay in the New York Observer offers this explanation:
"Dude" was originally a mockery of gentlemanliness, and surfers later rescued the gentlemanliness from the mockery. When transformed in subcultural slang the original irony was itself ironized, and, in the way a double negative can make a positive, it became thereby a mostly sincere, slightly arch term of gentlemanly respect. Surfer dudes decided to own it, own their elaborate subcultural aesthetic dandyism, the way some ethnic groups believe they can own words that were originally derisive slurs. In a way, to address someone as "dude" became a sign of ironic respect for that person’s ironic sensibility.
Dude! So the recent purveyors of dudeness started out by employing it ironically, just like me -- and the word deliberately retains that sly nod-and-a-wink, even today. Dude, I feel, like, so totally vindicated.
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