The female equivalent of dude.
The "-ette" suffix comes
from the French, and while its use to indicate a diminutive form
(cigarette, kitchenette, dinette) is and always has been common, its use to indicate
merely the female equivalent of a male term is fairly modern
(suffragette being one of its earliest incarnations.)
One of
the lasting criticisms of this type of neologism is that it
intrinsically devalues the female form as compared to the male form
through etymology: first through its origination as a suffix indicating
the diminutive, and secondly through implying that, as it is the
extended form, that the male form is the original and thus more
acceptable of the two.
Consider also the irony that the term
"dude" for a man originates as an insult by women: a dude was an urban
dandy (usually an Easterner) who visited the then-Wild West and tried
to appropriate its tougher customs, often with laughable results. When
these men visited the prostitutes of the area, they were termed "dudes"
as a sort of in-joke (a "dude" is a literal saddle sore, the blisters
a novice horse rider receives before developing a callus.)
Of
course, dudette wasn't derived until the surfer/stoner era appropriated
the term "dude" and became just another way of saying "girl." As that
era has more or less come to pass, dudette has all but disappeared from
the lexicon. It can mostly be found these days flowing from the mouths of aging surfers cum radio deejays and occasionally very unhip parents.
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