dude

"This study hasn't been done, I wouldn't think, but it would be very interesting to know the 10 words with this linguistic versatility. Can anything be more versatile than "Dude." Hard to imagine. But what are, for instance, the top ten? I think "wow" would make this list. I find myself using it lots of ways. I am sure there is an intellectual somewhere who takes this to me a measure of our decline as a civilization, but then if you are an intellectual everything, with the possible exception of an outbreak of Mozart festivals, is precisely this. Happily, it is the anthropologists job to observe, not judge."

via This Blog Sits at the
Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, one of my favorite blogs.