What he couldn't have imagined then was that 14 years later, he would inspire arguably their most famous character. He was part of the Seattle Liberation Front, or SLF, a radical anti-Vietnam War movement in the early 1970s (we'll get back to that in a moment).

To dig deeper into the biographies of such ordinary words as ‘silhouette’, ‘panorama’ and ‘dude’ is to uncover surprising histories that change the way we understand and appreciate their resonance and ever-evolving meaning. The Dude is a lazy, laconic oaf who desires nothing more than to bowl with his buddies, talk existentialism with cowboys, get high, and drink White Russians with.Eventually, lower class schools with a greater mix of subcultures allowed the word to spread to almost all cultures and eventually up the class ladders to become common use in the U.

No wonder the US transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed in the ascent of spirit, once asserted: “ pictures must not be too picturesque”. We promise we will only send relevant content , and only when we have something worth sharing with you!In 1931, the US sculptor Alexander Calder and the French avant-garde pioneer Marcel Duchamp added another twist to the word’s meaning. In addition to the Dowd inspiring the Dude, there are other nuggets of reality that made it into the film.

Eventually ‘mobile’, as a stand-in for riffraff and rabble, was compressed further still to the slur we still use today: ‘mob’. This use is reflected in the dude ranch, a guest ranch catering to urbanites seeking more rural experiences. Rather than a derogatory synonym for ‘preposterous’, ‘surreal’ was intended to signify our secret access to universal truths.If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter . Derived from the Italian word ‘ pittoresco’, ‘picturesque’ was seized upon at the end of the 18th Century by upper-class British artists who had been inspired by the luminous Italian landscape paintings they’d encountered while visiting the great hubs of European culture on what became known as The Grand Tour.

Answer: The Dude survived our testing without a problem, but extreme use could result in a puncture. On July 23, 2019 Boris Johnson used the word "dude" as an acronym for his Conservative Party leadership campaign platform.While it is always observed with surprise when reality appears to imitate art, in fact the world of painting, drawing, and sculpture is responsible for giving us a great deal of the language with which we understand and articulate our experience of being in the universe. While Joel and Ethan Coen are two of the greatest filmmakers alive (with Oscar gold to prove it), their biggest and perhaps most lasting contribution to our culture is The Big Lebowski. This usage of "dude" was still in use in the 1950s in America, as a word for a tourist—of either sex—who attempts to dress like the local culture but fails.