Bro!
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On walkways around Penn's campus, I'm hearing bro more and more often. Especially common, or at least especially striking, is a monosyllabic response meaning something like "You're kidding!"
A: So then they [blah blah]…
B: Bro!
…which I'm hearing as often among groups of female students as male students (though I admit that the added surprisal in that context might leave me with a false estimate of frequency).
More traditional vocative uses — "See ya later, bro" — are also common among all-female student groups.
No students seem to be using sis, even among sorority members.
See also "Gender-neutral 'bro'", 9/26/2020, and "Brose", 3/25/2025
jhh said,
April 15, 2026 @ 6:56 pm
What I'm hearing on my campus might be rendered "Bruh!" You haven't heard that down your way?
Jonathan Smith said,
April 15, 2026 @ 7:09 pm
speculatively, this new meaning 'WTH; come on now; how could you/they?' requires the bruh version (vowel alternation also covered on LL at some point.) don't quote me though
[anonymous student] said,
April 15, 2026 @ 7:31 pm
As a 12th-grade student in the Chicago suburbs, I think "bro" and "bruh" are both idiomatic for this use, but "bruh" is much more common.
Garrett Wollman said,
April 15, 2026 @ 8:52 pm
Let us know if you start hearing "Hwæt!", then we'll know that Maria Dahvana Headley was right.
Kenny Easwaran said,
April 15, 2026 @ 9:15 pm
Back in March I had a student come to my office to talk about grades, but she began something like, "Bro, this term has been difficult, my family in Iran [tears up] were shot at the protests in January [continues about further events you might imagine]". I was very struck by what seemed to me to be a very unexpected tone of events to follow the use of the word "bro", even on top of it seeming incongruous to me for a female student to use when addressing a professor. I suppose students these days are using this word in a lot more ways than we did 20 years ago. (I was really impressed at how well she was able to make up the work and then do fine on the test.)
David Marjanović said,
April 16, 2026 @ 5:15 am
Maybe the "vocative uses" aren't vocative anymore.
In Vienna, a word that is etymologically "old one" (adjective, masc. nom. sg.) is an expression of exasperation that has nothing to do with any people present. It seems not even to have been recognized when it was loaned completely unchanged from the dia- into what I call the mesolect.
I continue to insist that the first sentence of Beowulf is a rhetorical question: "What haven't we heard of the Spear-Danes [and their glorious stabby deeds]!" Well, the "-n't" part isn't there, but it isn't necessarily there in German either.
Jenny Chu said,
April 16, 2026 @ 8:52 am
My college age children consistently use this word in its sense of "You must be kidding!" They use it orally as well as in text form, in which case they spell it "bruh", uncapitalized and without punctuation.
Robert Coren said,
April 16, 2026 @ 8:55 am
This sounds like the way people have been using "Dude!" for a while now.
cervantes said,
April 16, 2026 @ 9:25 am
My memory of this is hazy, it's from a way back, and I don't remember where I read it. But a young woman was trying to argue that there is no specific gender implied by the word "guy," that "guys" can mean men or women. She concluded, "Even guys say it."
Of possible relevance, in women's basketball it is customary to refer to the opponent you are guarding as your man, and that form of defense is called man to man.
ajay said,
April 16, 2026 @ 10:02 am
MLE doesn't use "bro" very much but it uses "cuz" a lot, which I find pleasantly Shakespearean. "Brother" is fairly common but mostly among (South) Asian Muslims.
in women's basketball it is customary to refer to the opponent you are guarding as your man
Obviously because you are supposed to stand by them.
Tim Leonard said,
April 16, 2026 @ 10:51 am
Not "sis", but "girl" (or as transcribed in the following video, "gurl") seems to carry the same meaning, at least in some groups. Here's an example of its use in a candid video clip: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1sAflANfJ4w
J.W. Brewer said,
April 16, 2026 @ 11:03 am
My wife has been a user of vocative "dude" for female addressees for decades now, but apparently not thus far of vocative "bro." Which I know because one of our sons (now aged eleven) has started using vocative "bro" in addressing her, which she initially seemed to find unsettling for gender-related reasons separate and apart from what might be thought excessive informality in addressing ones parents.
One interesting irony is that attempts over the last 50 years to shift English Bible translations to more gender-neutral or "inclusive" language have often sought to change the traditional vocative "brethren" (ἀδελφοί) that occurs frequently in the New Testament. Reconceptualizing "brethren" as cromulently referring to specifically female addressees is a solution they AFAIK had not really considered.
Michael Watts said,
April 16, 2026 @ 11:26 am
Huh. It would never have occurred to me that "brethren" might not already do that. Or rather, I feel that "brethren" cannot refer to "specifically" anyone, male or female, but must always refer to an indefinite group, and that group is conceived of as being gender-inclusive.
"Brethren" are metaphorically kin in the same way that two cities or two languages may be called "sisters", but they can't be literal kin. Literal kin are called "brothers".
Peter Grubtal said,
April 16, 2026 @ 12:46 pm
Michael Watts:
You tell that to the woke crowd.
J.W. Brewer said,
April 16, 2026 @ 1:46 pm
Michael Watts: Wait 'til you hear that some of the same people felt that the wording "for us men and for our salvation" in the Creed was not "inclusive." That said, your point that "brethren" by our time had become for many a weird church-register-only word that could thus easily deviate in semantic scope from "brothers" is an interesting one that was probably insufficiently considered in many of those debates.
Peter Grubtal: I think it's a bit anachronistic to apply the current vogue-word "woke" to the earnest-to-strident reformers of the 1970's & thereabouts.
J.W. Brewer said,
April 16, 2026 @ 2:26 pm
By the way, one way you can tell that not everyone shares Michael Watts' take on "brethren" is the notable revival in the last four or five decades of the parallel "sistren," sometimes used jocularly or semi-jocularly (because some find faux-archaic-sounding words amusing) but other times not, and I suspect sometimes borrowed for earnest use from a jocular source. I suspect that this is mostly a bunch of independent new coinages-by-analogy rather than the result of modern users having discovered it by combing the OED or pre-1600 source documents that used it.
But again my broader point is that the use of vocative "bro" or "dude" for female addressees is a trend in the exact opposite direction to the modern trend of deprecating the traditional use of word-perceived-as-at-least- default-male (like "brethren") to apply to mixed-sex groups. Which I think is great! Not all semantic shifts or related social trends are marching in cultural/political lockstep, and the world is more gloriously chaotic than that.
Peter Taylor said,
April 16, 2026 @ 4:29 pm
It's acquired some international currency too. Yesterday as I walked home (in Spain) I overtook a young lad who was remonstrating with the dog he was walking, basically asking it to slow down and not pull him along, in Spanish with "bro" as a vocative loanword.
Michael said,
April 16, 2026 @ 5:35 pm
Regarding "Dude:" as an Eastern transplant to the West Coast, I found the versatility of this word goes far beyond any singular definition. It CAN mean "you're kidding," or just as readily "I agree 100%," "you are stoned/crazy/stupid," "that's not what happened," or just "hello," depending on context and tonality. It is so versatile, in fact, that I found I couldn't resist letting it creep into my own vocabulary, despite having one fellow-transplant who would say, "don't call me dude" every time he heard it.
Lars Skovlund said,
April 16, 2026 @ 6:28 pm
I will just point your attention to this thread over at languagehat. Seems quite similar.
Josh R. said,
April 16, 2026 @ 7:14 pm
David Marjanović said,
"I continue to insist that the first sentence of Beowulf is a rhetorical question: "What haven't we heard of the Spear-Danes [and their glorious stabby deeds]!" Well, the "-n't" part isn't there, but it isn't necessarily there in German either."
The problem is that the first sentence of Beowulf does not exist in isolation. Does your theory work for the many other instances of utterance-initial "Hwæt" in Old English poetry? Does it account for the clearly exclamatory "Hwæt þá" found in AElfric's prose?
The best look at hwæt that I'm aware of is Walkden's 2013 article:
http://walkden.space/Walkden_2013_hwaet.pdf
Walkden makes a pretty clear case that the exclamatory Hwæt used to begin Beowulf and other poems is not a pure interjection (as it is commonly explained), but his analysis shows that it was pretty clearly used in an exclamatory fashion, similar (but not entirely analogous) to how we say "What a deal!" or "What big eyes you have."
Personally, I go with what the native speakers say, and "hwæt" was used by Anglo-Saxons to gloss Latin "enim": indeed, truly.
HS said,
April 16, 2026 @ 7:51 pm
Both "Bro" and "Cuz" are characteristic of (and stereotypical of) Maori English. As is the combined form "cuzzy bro", which has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary cuzzy bro, n. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary
I continue to insist that the first sentence of Beowulf is a rhetorical question: "What haven't we heard of the Spear-Danes [and their glorious stabby deeds]!"
From what I've read on the subject, I agree. Though admittedly my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon (and German) is precisely zero.
The positive "What we have heard of the Spear-Danes!" also seems to me to be a perfectly possible Modern English translation when said with the right rhetorical force. "How [much] we have heard of the Spear-Danes!" might be another translation.
ktschwarz said,
April 16, 2026 @ 8:27 pm
cervantes: That story is from Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, in a column called "Changes in Default Words and Images" from 1982. Hofstadter hated gender-agnostic "guys", calling it "one of my pet peeves". But 1982 was a lifetime ago.
Nelson Goering said,
April 17, 2026 @ 1:47 am
"I continue to insist that the first sentence of Beowulf is a rhetorical question: "What haven't we heard of the Spear-Danes [and their glorious stabby deeds]!" Well, the "-n't" part isn't there, but it isn't necessarily there in German either."
Well, even if *hwæt* is interrogative there (which I doubt), that's still a mistranslation, of a type that I see every time I teach Beowulf: "Spear-Danes" (Gār-Dena) isn't an object of *ge·fru[g]non*, which actually takes the accusative object *þrym* "might, power". Modern English is particularly unfortunate in using the idiom "hear(d) of", which makes it sound like it should correspond to a genitive object in Old English, but this is misleading. I always encourage my students to use "heard about" for *ge·fru[g]non*, to help them avoid getting to tangled up with of's and genitives.
I'd note that *þrym* is a masculine noun, so it can't agree directly with *hwæt*. (You can use hwæt in predicative questions without agreement, as in *hwæt eart þū* "who are you?", but that's a different construction, and I don't think is at all relevant to the opening of Beowulf.) You could, I suppose, posit an implied apposition: "what [stuff], [what] power have we [not] heard of the people-kings of the Spear-Danes in ancient times". That seems strained to me, though.
In any case, as Josh R. says, an interrogative won't work well in many other contexts. Take line 530, for example, where Beowulf begins his reply to Unferth:
“Hwæt þū worn fela, winĕ mīn Ūnferð,
bēore druncen ymb Brecan sprǣce,
sægdest from his sīðe."
Other instances of "exclamatory" hwæt occur in lines 942, 1652, 1774 (with an intransitive verb!), and 2248.
Like Josh R., I'm of the opinion that George Walkden has solved this particular issue.
Andreas Johansson said,
April 17, 2026 @ 6:19 am
Re "brethren", to me it has strong connotations of metaphorical but institutionalized kinship, like being members in the same monastic order.
J.W. Brewer said,
April 17, 2026 @ 6:34 am
@ktschwarz: Way back in '82 I was myself a teenager who was enamored of Hofstadter's writing because I was not yet old enough to identify him as a crank. But here's the thing – there are quite a lot of speakers out there for whom words like "guy" or "dude" and maybe now "bro" are gender-agnostic when used vocatively yet simultaneously limited (at least presumptively) to males when used in third-party reference. I find this fascinating because I find the unpredictable variousness of actually-existing natural languages fascinating, but certain peevish personalities find this Highly Illogical and thus objectionable. The anecdote cervantes posted is, I think, supposed to make us sneer at the speaker for being Highly Illogical.
Ken said,
April 17, 2026 @ 10:52 am
@Michael (April 16 @5:35 pm): Other words are equally versatile, such as the F-word. Stan Freberg's classic "John and Marsha" suggests you can do it with any word, using tone to carry emotion and meaning.
HS said,
April 17, 2026 @ 6:53 pm
@Nelson Goering
There doesn't seem to me to be a lot of difference in practice in this case between a rhetorical question and an exclamation. I took David Marjanović to be saying, not that it was technically grammatically interrogative, but that it wasn't a stand-alone one-word interjection like "Hark!", which is how it is usually translated.
SARAH C CREEL said,
April 17, 2026 @ 10:37 pm
If this change process isn't being called "bro bleaching," major missed opportunity.
Nelson Goering said,
April 18, 2026 @ 12:16 am
HF, the "usually" part may be true for translators specifically, but among editors and commentators focused on the original, there's a very long history of taking *hwæt* as more integrated into the clause. Everyone I've talked to who's actually read Walkden's paper has been convinced by his analysis. The "adverbial" hwæt, as it's traditionally called, can I think now be called the mainstream position among linguists.
In any case, I can only respond to what DM actually wrote, which was "I continue to insist that the first sentence of Beowulf is a rhetorical question". If he just meant the same thing Walkden did, then I have no disagreement with him, but to me his description seems to be a rather different thing! I was also nitpicking the translation he gave, which doesn't really capture what's going on in the original (looking back at what he wrote, it's the sneaky little *and* that's actually the crux of the matter).
Peter Grubtal said,
April 18, 2026 @ 1:38 am
@J.W. Brewer
Your remarks on Hofstadter are appreciated. Despite being sorely tempted I never acquired the one-time cultic ”Gödel, Escher, Bach”, which you still see in Foyles. Even recently I've been tempted to grab it, but I'll now pass on with relief that I haven't missed anything.
J.W. Brewer said,
April 18, 2026 @ 9:35 am
@Peter Grubtal: Well, there are a lot of books I read with some profit when I was 16 or 17 that I wouldn't reread now and wouldn't recommend to a reasonably well-read adult, yet would still not actively try to stop a current teenager from dipping into. One could do better but could also do worse, and it's good for young people to learn to stumble toward enlightenment via various flawed waystations.
Jonathan Smith said,
April 18, 2026 @ 10:00 am
Joining the tangent, I mean… IDK exactly what is Douglas Hofstadter, but he is certainly not a "crank" — unless the term is interpreted to mean "academic who wrote well-received popular book(s) and is as a result occasionally pooh-poohed by the would-be serious"… cf. maybe Jared Diamond. Critics are generally just pointing out the obvious ("that popular book wasn't an academic treatise"), subtext often being "I wish I could write for a general audience, attract attention, and make (modest!) bank." That said No, Peter Grubtal, Gödel, Escher, Bach is definitely not for you, 16-year-old version or update(s), so good call there.
David Marjanović said,
April 19, 2026 @ 9:12 am
Thank you for Walkden's paper! I find nothing to disagree with there (apart from nitpicking some of the German examples).
I did mean something much closer to Walkden's result ("degree exclamative", a useful term I didn't know) than I managed to put into words (I was very tired); specifically Walkden's Modern English examples 27 and 33 – a "subordinate" clause used without a "main" clause to serve as an exclamation. The important part is that the whole clause, not just the first word, is the exclamation.
(I was thinking of it in German terms first: Was wir [schon/alles] über […] gehört haben! – finite-verb-final, not finite-verb-second like a real or rhetorical wh-question. The similarity to questions is greatly increased in Modern English word order. – Walkden actually makes a statistical point that the verb-final order of the example at the beginning of Beowulf is important, though of course not as important as it would be in the modern languages with their much stricter word orders.)
It is also true I forgot about the þrym and probably even forgot that gardena is genitive; worse, I didn't know there are so many similar examples in Old English, let alone Old Saxon…
ktschwarz said,
April 19, 2026 @ 1:08 pm
David, I think you got the idea in the first place from the <a href="https://languagehat.com/hwaet/#comment-114510discussion of Walkden's paper at Language Hat.
John Swindle said,
April 19, 2026 @ 6:06 pm
In Hawaiʻi it's "brah," to the extent that I initially assumed the "bro" reported from elsewhere was a misspelling or a mishearing.
Nelson Goering said,
April 20, 2026 @ 1:37 am
"I did mean something much closer to Walkden's result ("degree exclamative", a useful term I didn't know) than I managed to put into words (I was very tired)"
All good then! And hopefully you'll take it as a compliment that you usually express yourself so clearly and precisely that I took you entirely at face value. I do apologize if I was overly nitpicky…
David Marjanović said,
April 20, 2026 @ 2:51 pm
…Probably I did! It seems I didn't read the paper then, oddly; I must have been distracted.
I do!
First thing my thesis supervisor told me when I started writing papers: "you will be misunderstood – by someone, at some point, for some reason – so it's your responsibility to minimize the opportunities for that."
Haamu said,
April 20, 2026 @ 3:24 pm
@J.W. Brewer – These days, with true cranks seemingly in the ascendant everywhere, the word feels like a slur. And blithely dismissing Hofstadter as one is, at best, an idiosyncratic view. I'm not sure what you base it on.
Someone who would know a crank if he saw one was Martin Gardner. He literally wrote a book ("Fads and Fallacies…") on the topic, and in so doing helped to launch the modern Skeptical movement. Yet he held Hofstadter in high esteem throughout his life. It was on the basis of Gardner's review of Gödel, Escher, Bach in Scientific American that I grabbed a first printing I still treasure to this day. Even when the two found themselves in serious philosophical disagreement — based on my recollection of Gardner's review of I Am a Strange Loop, he thought (as do I) that Hofstadter's later consciousness theory claimed too much — the relationship remained, as far as I can tell, entirely respectful.
@Peter Grubtal – you have missed something. GEB is, in my view, a work of genius. But I might be overpraising it because when I first read it, in my early 20s, it resonated with my cognitive style, which has always been highly pattern-seeking and analogy-driven. The book opened my eyes to how powerful it was to embrace that style, an insight that has paid off for me across decades in most areas of my life. So I can rightly say that GEB was one of the most influential things I have ever read.
But it might not be so for you. Your cognitive style might not match. Or, nowadays, the book might seem much more commonplace, given everything that has transpired since it first appeared. I haven't reread it in over 30 years (although you two have motivated me to do so now) so I don't want to say how well it holds up.
The other reason it might not work for you: I agree with JWB that it is probably best encountered when you are young. (Sorry, I don't know how old you are, so take this as contingent, not conclusory.) But the reason is not, as JWB seems to imply, that the content is unsophisticated (quite the opposite) or intended for an immature audience.
Quite simply, there are certain books you should try to read when you are young because they require a certain plasticity of mind. GEB is certainly one of those.
So I won't try to change your mind about giving it a pass. You have to pare down your reading list somehow. As they say: so many books, so little time.
Peter Grubtal said,
April 21, 2026 @ 12:44 am
Haamu –
at the risk of extending this diversion beyond our welcome here….:
Perhaps it's a certain pretentiousness I thought I detected in the title which has always held me back from buying. But after decades of buy/not-buy pondering I could have read it in the time spent agonizing: let's see next time in London if I can walk by it.
Yes, Martin Gardner, I wish the current SciAm had room for someone of his calibre, and the fact that it doesn't provokes another bout of Kulturpessimismus in me.
Rodger C said,
April 21, 2026 @ 9:48 am
To me, the difference between Martin Gardner and Michael Shermer was a synecdoche of the magazine's whole decline. Nowadays … Well, I don't know what SA is like nowadays.
Peter Grubtalp said,
April 21, 2026 @ 10:23 am
Shermer was pretty good, a feet on the ground sort of guy. But he was booted off a couple of years ago.
Rodger C said,
April 22, 2026 @ 9:49 am
Peter: Yes, I think when he turned 65, which sounds like an excuse. He was interesting on occasion, but I found him a simplistic rationalist in contrast to Gardner.
Rodger C said,
April 22, 2026 @ 9:51 am
By the way, am I the only one who thought he looked a lot like Tom Paine?