Foschini merchandiser: “David, have you got a stiffy?”

Me: “Well, I think you’re very attractive….”

Nuh-huh. Speaking as a British person who has set foot in the US exactly once in my life, it’s perfectly obvious that this was racist. In fact, it is so obviously known, mostly through popular culture (ie the TV), that I’d dare anyone to go to Brixton and call a black man there “boy” and see what happens.

Apparently a real speech from the Australian Federal Parliament, by a member of parliament for a rural area:
—“I am a country member. I was elected as a country member, and I will always be a country member.”
—“Yeah, mate, we remember.”

I can think of one case where a group deliberately have chosen a diminutive description of themselves: The members of the now-defunct Kvindeligt Arbejderforbund (the Trade Union for Unskilled Women – the only all-female union in the world afaik) called themselves pigerne (could be translated as “the maids” or “the girls”), not kvinderne and definitively not damerne.

Now there’s some seriously bad news.

Here at the neglected end of the thread I can tell my international slang miscommunication—I was in Australia for the World Cup and I told people that since the US wasn’t in it of course I’d root for Australia, to which their response was “Not with me you don’t.”

(Well not really, they laughingly explained what I’d done wrong, but my version is funnier.)

In Glaswegian slang a Tim is a moderately insulting term for Catholic. I don’t know the derivation. A Billy is a Protestant (presumably from the Protestant King Billy, aka William III, formerly William of Orange) but that’s not so widely used. The equivalent in Norn Iron is “Taig” (rhymes with Hague) and “Prod” respectively.

If you imagine distaste for being called “boy” is “hypersensitivity to racial issues,” you’re either bullshitting and don’t know any black people, or you’re one of these. Hate to break it to you, buddy.

In deference to any offense to any and all other Leporidae, on and on and on and……..

As a southerner after a fashion, Toby Keith sucks. It’s not prejudice, it’s taste.

Of course that works for Northern racism,

Nah, draft and race riots are more our style. We tend not to go on and on about how we understand our nigras better than anyone else and used to love our mammies.

I spent a year in Bloomington Indiana. Story had it the Ku Klux Klan had been founded in Martinsville, 10 miles to the north.