I’m in the coffee shop this week. Conversations swirl like loose leaves on an autumn breeze. I zone in and out. That’s guided by the Writing Neurons. Sometimes, they fuse a solid grip on my focus, and I notice nothing outside of the scenes in my head and the words on the screen. When they let go, I generally look up to breathe, blink, take in some water and coffee.
Lo, I hear words then. “Bro’, are you going to blah blah blah?” This is one young female talking to another. I suspect they’re high schoolers. We’re two blocks from the high school and youth is oozing out of them.
“No, bro, I can’t, got to blah blah blah.”
I’m taken by how “bro'” has evolved in use. I’ve used bro’ for decades with males of all colors, ages, positions, and relationships. Never, though, never, with a woman. Took a while for me to accept hearing and calling females ‘guys’. Guys was always…um, a guy thing…to me.
“Bro’,” a young female says to her young male companion. Appearing to be about fifteen, sixteen, they speak and move with BF/GF intimacy. She goes on to talk to him about tonight’s dinner. Later, I hear him say, “Bro’, I gotta fly.”
They rise together and hold hands, two bros moving into the world, progressing in life, changing languages, changing expectations.
I think to them, good luck, bro’.
Michael Seidel, writer 
There was a year that the older elementary and the middle school kids called each other “dude.” Not chick and dude, as we did in the 70s, but everybody was “dude.” It did create some dissonance until I got used to it! Which was about the time it had run its course. Of course!
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