I’m sick of the bros! It’s not just that boys and men call each other bro. It’s how the term has invaded our culture. We have dude-bros, tech-bros, bro-grammers, bromance (which has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary), bro code, brobituary (something said of a guy who just got married), brohemian, and even Bernie bro (a supporter of Bernie Sanders).

(It’s also now common usage in TV commercials. For example, one of the most ridiculous is an ad showing two or three guys eating the same combination of pizza and sides and calling each other bundle-bros. But I digress.)

A little research shows that “bro” may have started with surfer culture. Nowadays, however, it is associated with misogyny, entitlement, and hyper-masculinity of the toxic variety. A bro doesn’t associate with women, except as a sexual conquest. The expression “bros before hoes” is a repellent example of this. The term is also used to assert that an activity is heterosexual, not gay—bro-hug, for example.

(I don’t think anyone calls my husband “bro” at work, though if they do, I don’t want to know. (Sometimes they call him Santa or Jerry.) And he isn’t into the “manosphere” of bro-culture. Dan’s philosophical. He says, “Call me anything but late for dinner.” But I digress again.)

The word itself has gone through changes over the years. Starting with “bro,” the word later was often pronounced as “brah” (a variation I knew wouldn’t last long because it sounds like “bra”), and more recently as “bruh.” (Which sounds like someone started to say “brother,” had a brain fart, and stopped.)

(Why has this happened? My personal theory has to do with the Great Vowel Shift, which is a real thing that linguists talk about. The pronunciation of certain vowels in English changed over the years (primarily between the 1400s and the 1600s). For example, the pronunciation “beet” in the Middle Ages became “bite,” which is how the word is pronounced now. “Here” became “her” and “hoos” became “house.” It has to do with the position of the teeth and the tongue in the mouth when saying those words and applies mostly to long vowels. It didn’t happen just in English, but in other languages like Swedish and Norwegian. It’s really only useful when you’re reading Chaucer aloud, but who does that except English majors and linguists? But I digress, at length and boringly.)

While we’re on the subject of forms of address (which I was a moment ago), I’d like to note that women have no way of informing each other of a flat tire. Let’s take the case of a man with a tire that’s deflating. Another man can say, “Hey, buddy (or mister, dude, guy, or, presumably, bro), your tire is low.” (Women can say, “Hey, mister,” too.) When the person with the flat tire is a woman, men can yell, “Hey, lady, your tire is low.” But there are no good ways for women to impart this information to other women. A woman could say, “Hey, lady (or sister or sis or miss), your tire is low,” but none of those sounds right. The best they can do is yell, “Excuse me, your tire is low,” but that doesn’t indicate who has the deflating tire. It could be anyone in the traffic pattern. (Women are therefore restricted to “excuse me” rather than “hey.” I suppose women could always point at the other woman’s tire without yelling anything, but that’s a little ambiguous. But I digress some more.)

What would the female equivalent of bro be? Sis? Sounds like the tire is leaking. Lady? Too formal. Chick? Too sixties. Woman? Too technical. Bitch? Just no. Female? Too dismissive. Anything else I can think of is just too vulgar. I guess we just have to wait for language to catch up to “bro.”