[tenderLoins]

I always thought "dude" meant: The crusty tuft of hair on a horse's asshole?

Seriously, a science teacher in high school read that definition from a dictionary, and handed out photocopies of it to my class, in the hopes that it would discourage us from using the word, because he got sick of hearing it. It had the opposite effect, obviously.

...but anyway, that's why I laughed when The Stranger in The Big Lebowski implied, with subtlety, the same meaning when he said it was a name "no one would self-apply" where he came from.

I'm sticking with "hairy horse anus."

[bcoates]

I don't know about the horse's ass part, but 'dude' is supposedly similar to 'yankee' in the rural western US, in the sense of being a useless, helpless outsider.