8/28/14
'Bro' Abuse
In this month's Esquire, Stephen Marche examines the use, or rather over use, of the word 'bro' by a generation of American men. "The use of the word bro is reaching epidemic levels," he writes. "Subject to intense semantic distortion and fluctuation, the word bro is slippery, but one feature of its use and abuse remains constant: the underlying contempt for male friendship it implies." He goes on to explore the ways male friendships are portrayed in media and how that effects the ways in which we treat one another. It's an interesting and well-researched theory but it's definitely something of a downer, brah.
FYI
The lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary kind of gave up trying to define the word because it has "a level of nuance that a conventional dictionary entry is ill-suited to describe: The semantic boundaries are subjective and in constant flux."