Picture me in 1985
- tow-headed kid in jams1 and a sleeveless Tee, skateboard at the ready. Everything was rad or bad2; everyone was dude or brah.
Bro is an old word; some of the earliest uses of bro as a shortening of brother date back to the 1600s. In more modern times, it came out of Black culture as a way of addressing people who were not, in fact, one’s biological sibling. But even then it was mostly used to signify that someone is as close to you as a brother, that someone is your family whether you’re biologically related to them or not.
Eventually, that context moved out of3 Black culture and into subcultures. Specifically, it reached me as through two different-but-related subcultures. The first and earliest of these was SoCal surf culture.
I grew up in Arizona, an area somewhat famed for its lack of an ocean4. It is however, right next door to California, an area somewhat famed for its refusal to fall into the ocean. And man, us kids in Arizona, we wanted to be Cali surf kids so bad. We had the shorts, we had the haircuts, we had the lingo.
In the popular culture of the time, surfers had a reputation for being layabouts who cared for nothing except the next wave. They spoke in a laid back, lackadaisical drawl, adding extra syllables to duuuuude and softening the vowels of words like brah5. A clear semantic difference existed here: dude referred to anyone and everyone. It signified everything from you to him to those guys over there6. Meanwhile, brah meant bro, brother.
At the same time, and something that wouldn’t reach me for a few more years, punk rock was evolving a somewhat complicated relationship to the word bro. On the one hand, bros were the dominant forces at school - the jocks and normiesl. Bro would eventually be used to epitomize these cliques of athletes and popular kids as gym-bros and finance-bros and bro-bros. But all that was still to come. In 1991 there was just Pennywise.
Surf culture was quick to adopt punk rock music. As the 70s turned into the 80s and surfing and skating both began to go mainstream, the outlaw, rebel aesthetic that had fueled both sports found an outlet in punk rock. By the mid 80s, the cultures had fused so much that their slang had become standardized. It was just a matter of pronunciation. So, a laid back surfer might say bruh, but a hardcore, L.A. punk singer would say bro, especially when memorializing a friend.
Pennywise’s 1991 song Bro Hymn7 does just that. Several of the band’s friends who passed away in various accidents are remembered in different versions of the song that the band has recorded over the years. Most notably when, a few years after the original version was recorded, one of the original songwriters also passed away unexpectedly. Both versions use bro to signify a bond deeper than mere friendship:
If you’re ever in a tough situation
We’ll be there with no hesitation
Brotherhood’s our rule we cannot bend.
But time moves on. And language, as it always does, changed. Dude and brah became more and more synonymous, eventually reaching a parity wherein both words could mean anyone and everyone.
More importantly, both words acquired usage as, well, any part of speech you could want to use. In 1998’s BASEketball, the two lead characters (played by South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker) have an argument in which the word dude is used several dozen times culminating in a ten second burst where it is the only word used.
It’s easier to show than tell. Minute 1:04 to 1:14 in this clip.
I haven’t seen an example, but I can tell you from experience that bro, or brah, or bruh can be used in exactly the same way. In fact, bruh, the newest and most internetty of all bro’s incarnations, is defined specifically as an interjection, e.g. the words we use when we need to stop the conversation cold and make someone listen to what they actually just said:
From Wiktionary:
Expressing a feeling that something is an exceptionally stupid or inappropriate thing to think or to propose to do.
Person 1: I'll pour some corn syrup in my diesel tank. — Person 2: Bruh.
Person 1: I think the word partisan derives from how they parted their hair. — Person 2: Bruh.
Person 1: I just drank some oil! - Person 2: Bruh
The timeline of where and how bro has evolved is, of course, far, far messier than I’ve presented it here. Attempting to trace the full history of the word is like trying to trace a line through a scribble - possible but without any definitive results. In any case, accent and pronunciation play a much bigger role than the mere lexical forms can represent; each instance of bro or brah or bruh represents a wealth of sounds - some overlapping, some more differentiated - that add nuance and intonation to what has become an all-purpose word.
Anyway, I’m off to go see if anyone’s still making Jams. Later, bruh.
The Pitch
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What We’re Reading
Normally, this is where I’d mention a book I’m reading or interested in, but, uhh, I’m behind in my reading. So, until I get caught up, maybe next month, maybe in ten years, I’m going to take a different tack and recommend three news stories I’ve been following more closely than perhaps I should.
Imagine having an actual globe-spanning rail network, being able to go from London to Paris to New York all by train. All it needs is one, small, 100-billion dollar tunnel…
Language and the study of how it works in the human animal is the key to understanding all of human thought and sociological behavior. Just ask any linguist…
Martha Wells’ Murderbot stories are funny, engaging, cathartic, and more than a little prescient. In other words, want to know how A.I. is going to kill all the humans? Here’s the answer…
Here you go: Jams Shorts. But be warned, once you see these, you can never unsee them.
When things weren’t bad or rad, they were bitchin’. On the playground, we could never decide if bitchin’ was actually a swear word or not so we used it sparingly, especially where grown-ups might overhear.
A lot of popular culture comes from Black culture. Whether this is theft, appropriation, or simple absorption is a matter of heated debate; this is a conversation worth having and worth respecting. I’m choosing to use “moved out of” here because - as far as I can tell - the usage of bro as a shortening of brother is such a simple and integral part of how English works that it is very hard down to pin to one specific group of people. Instead, we have a lot of converging factors, as discussed in the rest of the article.
As George Strait sings, “I got some ocean front property in Arizona.” It’s, like, our national anthem.
Endless debates about whether a girl could be a dude ensued. They can. They are.
And it’s many versions.
Bruh. You missed a great opportunity to reference how much Avatar 2 overused the word Bro: https://youtu.be/cPKxeLMvc_U 🤭