More fun with words

By now, only my cat hasn't heard of the "Dude, you're getting a Dell" guy.

(If you must know, the actor who played the slacker wannabe-computer sales dude in the ubiquitously annoying Dell commercials, Benjamin Curtis, was busted for pot possession last year. Here's the New York Daily News piece on the incident.)

But I'm digressing...again.

So the real purpose of this post is to share the absolutely earth-shattering news of a University of Pittsburgh linguist's just-released research on, you guessed it, the word, "dude". Here's the Associated Press piece on it. The University's own paper, the Pitt Chronicle (yes, I read them all), ran this story.

It turns out there's a lot more to this word than what the strung-out TV pitchman would have had us believe. It's an utterly fascinating piece of research.

Words never cease to serve as sources of enlightenment and fun. May it always be so.