We need to talk about calling people “bros”
The suffix has had a sufficient run
If you look at Google’s Ngram Viewer, the word “bro” took off in 2010.
2010 now feels like about seven different eras of cultural evolution ago, but I’ve been watching this word metastasize into something like a discursive cancer, one that went from a perfectly reasonable slang for a certain kind of guy to a very lazy form of rhetorical dismissal deployed by the most vacuous members of the keyboard class and finally into something so pervasive that even I have a hard time not using it any time I talk about dudes.
“Bro” is an old, old piece of slang. It may even be several hundred years old, according to Oxford University Press.
It has certainly been around my whole life.
I had a friend in elementary school that we called Jamie at the time. Of course he would eventually become “James.” James was a bro in gestation, as we know it today. Even way back in the 80s, before the word had any particularly em…