I like to use “dude” because I find it to be a term appropriate for all ages and genders. That said, I also call girls “man,” and people who are older than me “kid,” so who knows what I think I'm doing.

In his article “Dude” for American Speech in 2003, Scott Kiesling argues that the term “dude,” used mainly amongst young men, satisfies the need for both a marker of solidarity among men and acts as a distancing technique: “dude” indicates a socially encouraged masculine solidarity and upholds heterosexism: calling someone “dude” indicates that you are close, but not intimate.

Kiesling draws his data from surveys of his students at Pittsburgh, a study he did on the speech patterns of a fraternity (the conversation snippets he offers in his dude article are worth reading, though not for Kiesling's analysis of their use of “dude” but rather for their un-commented-on blatant racism) and from his own experience as “a bona-fide ‘dude-user’ in the 1980s.”

Short history: dude started out being used in the late 19th century in New York to refer to people who cared too much about their clothes. The term pretty much referred to an urban dandy, and as it traveled West referred to citydwellers who were too refined and foppish for the wild country (duderanch). Dude came back to refer postively to a snappy dresser in slang among African Americans in the 1930s and 40s, and was, like cool, groovy, etc. eventually appropriated into mainstream culture. Its current usage comes from its transformation in American surfer slang of the late 60s and is now being read as following the path of “fuck”: able to be placed in almost any context.

Writing for The New York Observer Ron Rosenbaum relates his discussion of “dude” to Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Answering the question “Why Dude now?” Rosenbaum writes:

(for a reprinted version: see here)

What is most interesting to me in the analyses by Rosenbaum, Kiesling and others is that “dude” has crossed over in the mainstream as a safely heterosexual indicator of comradery and intimacy for young men, a key to heterosexist masculinity. And yet it originated as a designator for a less-than-masculine dandyism. What happened to the “dude” of Bowie's (via Mott the Hoople) gay anthem “All the Young Dudes?” There seems to be a significant gulf between glam rock and the frat house.

An AP article on Kiesling’s findings ends thus:

The “shocker” of the last line is supposed to be self-evident. As Kiesling himself notes, “dude” is predominantly used by young men, which he identifies as under 30. So watch out old dudes! (and might I recommend, to you over 30 bunch, Dude, Where's My Walker?)

Appendix 1: The Dude Where’s My Car? Literary Game
Rosenbaum offers a game which can be adapted in myriad ways by replacing “literary” with all manner of other categories (philosophy, politics, what have you)

Of course Rosenbaum and I both agree that “The Sun Also Rises — Dude, Where’s My Dick?” is the best answer to come out of this game.

Appendix 2: The first few pages of a Google search for “Dude, where's my” yielded these endings of the phrase:

Appendix 3:
An MLA bibliography search yielded: