A Brief Literary History of Bros

While I initially planned something a little more ambitious for this assignment, both the constraints of the programs and my inabilities to figure them out made this assignment more difficult to carry out. Part of this assignment was inspired by two recent conversations: one on a venn diagram NPR made a few years back on what the "categories" of bros exist; and secondly, a video posted on "bros" turning into cat lovers.

First, of all, the OED defines "bro" as most commonly "A written or colloq. abbrev. of brother n.   Pl. bros. (joc. pronounced /brɒs/ ), in the title of a firm." This first appears c.1660 in a diary entry. More interestly, there is a draft addition stating a bro is "a fellow, ‘guy’, ‘dude’. Also: spec. a black man" or "a male friend."

Here is a Google N-Gram of the words “bro” “pal” “dude” from 1800-2008:

The Bookworm application, which searches texts in ChromAm until 1920, had a chart of the word "bro":

Lastly, I was curious what would happen if I uploaded something that was not traditionally read as a poem, nor followed the standards of proper English to the Poem Viewer tool. Not only did the application crash multiple times while trying to upload a published poem by James Tate, it really struggled with the text conversation I pulled from two football players. While I was clearly testing the limits of the tool, I think it's interesting to think about how we "standardize" something like a poem in terms of linguistic, syntax, etc. and what a computer application then can or can't do if we break those forms. I give you "The Bro Sonnet."

Poem Viewer of Text Conversation Allegedly from Richie Incognito and Johnny Martin (14 Lines – aka a Text Sonnet) (SOME LANGUAGE NSFW):