Friday words #293

When you listen to men talk, you hear variety of terms for other men:

• That guy is one of our homies.
• I can’t believe that dude said that.
• Way to go, pal.
• Bro, I don’t have time.
• Sorry, man.

Today’s new-to-me word is a clever portmanteau for these various terms: they’re bronouns. As one definition in Urban Dictionary has it, a bronoun is “Words used by bros to replace standard noun forms.” A more verbose definition on the page suggests that a bronoun is “any exclusively masculine pronoun used in place of traditional masculine pronouns, including but not limited to, dude, bro, cuz, homie, homeboy, man, guy, etc.”

The definitions note what seem to be three characteristics about the terms: the terms are masculine-derived; they’re used by men (“used by bros”); and they’re used when talking to (vocative) or about other men.

Probably all of these assertions are too strong. I’d say that the first is the least arguable—that the terms are derived from words that refer to men.

I don’t have any sociolinguistic data for the second assertion, namely that they’re used by men. I can certainly see (hear) myself using these, but I don’t know to what extent the terms are used by, you know, non-bros. It would be an interesting project to investigate whether women use terms like bro and pal and homies, and if so, what the distribution is by age, speaker community, and so on.

And do these terms refer only to men? Can a bro only be a boy or man? What about a pal? Can you say “Sorry, man” to someone who isn’t a man? A similar sociolinguistic investigation might tell us more about who the referents are for these terms.

Among these terms, dude seems like it might be the least sex-marked (?), at least in certain dialects. If someone says “The conference will have a dude talking about grammar,” would you understand that to mean that the speaker is a man, or could dude in the sentence refer to a woman?

As for guy, it seems to lean masculine in the singular, but guys (especially you guys for “y’all”) is widely used by both men and women about anyone.[1] (There is debate about whether guys is or can be completely bleached of its masculine origins, and some people make an effort to encourage the use of alternative terms.)

A personal aside: like all slang, bronouns are generational. I grew up after the pal and fella era; these terms sound old-fashioned to me. But I also grew up before the dude and bro eras, and while I have adopted dude, it feels unnatural to me to use bro. I’m pretty sure that the “preferred bronoun” (as someone has quipped) for my friends and me was man.

Anyway, bronouns. A funny term that seems to capture something about the way men talk, though it might rely too much on stereotypes to be much use in describing a real language phenomenon.

Origins! We were in New Orleans recently, meaning we were in the south, meaning that at some point we were offered mint juleps. I’m not a mint-julep person, but I did take an interest in where the word julep might have come from.

I wanted to make sure first I understood what a julep is. Like, are there juleps other than mint ones? A broad definition for julep is that it’s a drink that involves sugar syrup and booze over ice and a flavoring. Because in the US the flavoring is virtually always mint, the word julep is synonymous in American usage with mint julep. An older and more generic definition is medicinal—a julep was a sweetened liquid, possibly with a little alcohol, as a medium for taking an unpleasant remedy: as Mary Poppins advised us, a spoonful of sugar (and possibly a dram) helps the medicine go down.

Fine, but where did the word julep come from? We got it from French in medieval times. The interesting part is that julep entered Europe from Arabic julāb, possibly via Spanish and their long contact with the Moors. (There is a word julapim in medieval Latin, but maybe that was adapted from Spanish?)

Arabic in turn got the word from the Persian term gulāb, which means “rose water.” Although it’s not obvious, the Persian word gul is related to the Greek word rhodon and the Latin word rosa, both of which of course mean “rose.”  

In Indian cuisine, there’s a dessert called gulab jamun, which is made from small fried balls of dough that are covered in a sweet syrup made with rose water. There’s gulab again, this time having moved east from Persia.

It’s interesting to consider that the definition of julep seems to have stayed pretty stable as it wended its way through various languages: a(n) herbal infusion. It’s fun to think that a medieval speaker of Persian or Arabic might not be surprised to learn that their word gulab has become a mint julep today.

Like this? Read all the Friday words.

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[1] An article in the Washington Post discusses how Guys at the beginning of a sentence can signal that the speaker is not being entirely serious. [^]