Situational Meanings

I wonder if "dude" and "bucko" have about the same situational meaning to the persons who use them? I think that might be the case. I say it without looking either of them up in a dictionary, so maybe I'm wrong... I suspect, though, that the fellow why calls you "bucko" holds you in a deeper contempt but keeps it clean because he's afraid his mother (or somebody) will hear him.

Some additional thoughts (thanks to Alisa): Dude has a long and wide history and is very indefinite in it's meaning because of that except as it is situationally used. You have to deduce the meaning from context; if you just read a line or two of dialog on a page, you might not know what it means. All the uses of Bucko I ever heard seemed detrimental or demeaning to me--a very in-your-face form of address--although the persons using it would probably have denied it. The only people I can recall hearing it from were men trying to refrain from using cuss words. I think some country boy somewhere merely invented an evasive cuss word and it now comes out of other people's mouths from time to time!

I remember some writer back when I was a teenager was postulating that the beatnik use of daddyo was meant as a negation of authority figures. Like "daddy zero". Daddy is nothing to me. Something like that. I've never forgotten that interpretation, right or wrong, and I think it influences my view of "bucko".

There, that's everything I know about "bucko". It may be everything i know about anything!

---