I just read a piece in the New Yorker (well, I started it, it’s pretty long) in which Walt Whitman is quoted derisively dismissing the late Matthew Arnold as among “the dudes of literature.” Californian males my age and younger will tend to understand this in a way Whitman did not intend.

I discovered that the nineteenth-century definition of “dude” referred to “a well-dressed male, or one who is unfamiliar with life outside a large city” Thus, a “dude ranch” was a little cowboy getaway for citified know-nothings. This according to Wikipedia. Wikipedia even features a photo of one Evander Berry Wall, a New York socialite, known as “King of the Dudes.” You’ve got to check it out. the honorific fits under any definition of the word.