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Though dude had been applied to women as early as the mid-70's, its use came to a tipping point somewhere in the mid-80's. Attempts to establish dudette as the feminine form failed (the original term for a fine-looking woman among Hawaiian surfers, wahine, never established itself either) and it is now a fact that dude, at least in the prescriptive sense, can refer to both men and women. Perhaps the first mainstream display of this usage appeared in the movie Less Than Zero, in which there is a scene where a young woman defiantly tells her mother, "No way, dude!". Indeed, even American Heritage Dictionary recognizes this in its dude definition , that "dudes" are "Persons of either sex". According to Jesse Sheidlower, the North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, it is a topic (of walking distinctions) of interest amongst linguists and lexicographers whether dude in the descriptive ("that dude"), rather than the prescriptive ("hey dude") sense can be applied to both men and women. The latter is generally a non-specific exclamation which can be directed at, but not precisely applied to any certain person. The former is rarely applied to a woman; in fact doing so is sometimes a derogatory expression of a woman's over-masculinity ("she's quite a dude").
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