Look, and be Amazed

i’m kind of amazed that anyone is still amazed by this kind of thing.

“Al-bot(s)”

Did you come up with that word, or has it been in use before. It’s a good term, either way.

“calling a black adult man “boy” is 100%, absolutely, no question, racist. this is true even though white men sometimes refer to one another as boy, or old boy.”

Tell me how that makes sense, unless you’re a mind reader or assume all white southern men are racist? Most people are of course, north and south, but I doubt you’re making that argument.
And I thought the whole thing was as funny as O-bomb-a’s riffing on the angry peasantry.

I grew up in Texas, too, and I can tell you, pace quo vadis, that there’s a world of difference between “ol’ boy,” which is roughly affectionate and almost invariably used by one white man about another, and “that boy,” which, when used by a white person about an adult black man, is only slightly less offensive than “that nigger.” I would bet anything that there were no black faces in that roomful of Kentucky Republicans. Everybody in that room knew exactly what Davis’s remark meant and how it was meant, and enjoyed a chuckle about it, too.

Belle @6

Now that I think about it, in situations where one was talking about a specifically identified African-American male, as in this case, using ‘boy’ might have been treading the line even 25 years ago.

I was thinking more along the lines of: “I was talking to this (otherwise unspecified) ol’ boy at the bar yesterday…” and it was understood that one could not infer the race or age of the subject.

But, ‘dude’ was perhaps more common with my generation than ‘boy’ anyway.

The best/worst part about Yglesias threads is that just when you think it can’t get any worse, Chris Ford shows up to announce that in case anyone’s managed to forget, he’s still a proud, raving anti-semite.

If people in the South really do go around calling each other “that boy” all the time with no regard for race and the Obama campaign are just touchy and oversensitive, it’s a bit strange that this is the first time it’s happened, four months or so into the campaign.

I’m trying to think of a UK equivalent but can’t get further than a hypothetical Glaswegian politician who calls someone “pal”… (which means literally “friend” but in the Glaswegian vocative case roughly translates as “O person who I am about to subject to violent attack”; other examples of words which change meaning when used in the Glaswegian vocative are “Jimmy” which means “O male person” and “hen” which means “O woman over about 30 or so”).

The specific use we’re discussing here is unquestionably racsit, but I’m reminded of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Keep the Customer Satisfied’:

Deputy sheriff said to me
Tell me what you come here for, boy.

It could have been a song about a black man who was already in trouble and heading into more, but I always assumed the ‘boy’ in question was either Simon or Garfunkel, neither of whom are black…….just media-controlling crackers.

Of course, the correct affectionate term for black men in the south is ‘macaca boy’.

I’m pretty sure Sailer is this Steve Sailer, the notorious supremacist who writes for VDare. And as we can see from that thread, he hath cronies. Sort of person one should probably ban from one’s comments section forthwith if one was paying attention.

All of which has just conspired to put the Dukes of Hazzard theme tune in my head again.

I never watched the show, much, but it always struck me as curious that Hazzard County, Georgia, had a black population of zero . . .

Maybe we can all acknowledge two points:

a) Not every single Southerner who says “old boy” is a virulent racist.
b) Nevertheless, “boy” has an ugly history; almost all adult African-Americans consider it a racist insult; and people shouldn’t be surprised if it gives offense. A 49-year old politician should know better.

I don’t see a great mystery here.

dude, I was born in savannah georgia, and lived in a small town in south carolina until I was 8, in the home where my dad still lives. unless they’ve got magical, “make shit not be racist” pixie dust falling down from the trees like pollen in kentucky, then calling a black adult man “boy” is 100%, absolutely, no question, racist. this is true even though white men sometimes refer to one another as boy, or old boy.

Little lady doesn’t know what the heck she’s talking about.

Please note that Freddie does not equal Fred.

There’s a specific form of racism / sexism involving overfamiliarity. Calling an adult by his first name or a nickname in an official situation, and refusing to use his last name, was standard in the racist South.Black men would have to fight the county clerk to get their full formal name written on legal documents, for example. Calling Henry Jefferson “Henry” not racist if you know him personally and it’s an informal situation, but in a business or official context, or if you’re total strangers who haven’t been introduced, it would be racist.

If you substitute a white Henry Jefferson, exactly the same usage would be highly condescending and insulting, though not specifically racist. No one would do it without the intention of condescending or insulting someone — a man who is young, or poor, or inexperienced, in some other way impaired.

Saying “me and the boys are going out to have a few beers” is familiarity, but it’s appropriate familiarity. It implies a closeness which is real. (On the other hand, if “the boys” don’t actually like the guy coming along, and are just politely tolerating him, they would find saying that annoyingly overfamiliar.)

It’s pretty much identical with women and “girl” and the overfamiliar use of a woman’s first name.

You actually have a familiar ritual when the boss says “Just call me Henry!” It’s assumed that you’ll call him Mr. Jefferson until authorized. Or when someone newly introduced says “Call be Henry”.

These are tricky rules even though everyone learns them easily in context. Simple-minded people with no real life experience find them impossible to understand, especially if they’re crypto-racists with an axe to grind.

dang, i didn’t get the blockquote cite right. Quote begins at “He said..” and end at “an obvious selection.”

The person I feel most sorry for is Steven Saylor, the excellent novelist, whose good name gets progressively more eclipsed by Steve “our gene pool is being diluted” Sailer.

BTW, there was a much better Steve Sailer quote on another Yglesias thread. It really made you wonder if he lives on the same planet as the rest of us.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright is not going away. For example, he’s already signed up to be the main speaker at the huge NAACP annual dinner in Detroit. The man is an attentionaholic and there’s a part of him that would rather see Obama lose the election if he, Rev. Wright, can go down in the history books as the truth-telling prophet who showed that a black candidate can’t an even break in the white man’s system.

How can you call someone an “attention-holic” when they’ve spent over a month being one of the hottest topics in the news media and have never so much as said anything about the controversy in public, much less given an interview? And then he says Wright is more interested in being a victim than having Obama elected, even when it’s patently clear that he’s maintaining his silence for the sake of Obama’s campaign. It helps to have the sort of presumption of bad faith that seems to only be possible with virulent, dumb racism, I guess.

”unless they’ve got magical, “make shit not be racist” pixie dust falling own from the trees like pollen in Kentucky”

ha ha

Ronald Reagan took the secret of where get his, “make shit not racist pixie dust” to the grave. If they had any sources of that left they surely would have used to save George Allen.

For all of those who doubt the racist undertones of the word boy, I challenge you to go out and actually call a black man a boy. Let me know what happens.

In other words, he was belittling him anyway, even without the racist term.

And in his full remarks (this has an audio link) Davis has an utterly bizarre comment about Obama spending many years of his life in prison. What kind of garbage is that?

Fun fact: Geoffrey Davis was born in Montreal.

How can you call someone an “attention-holic” when they’ve spent over a month being one of the hottest topics in the news media and have never so much as said anything about the controversy in public, much less given an interview?

Projection.

Simple questions, simple answers . . .

And to think that before the days of the internet, blogs and all the other marvels of e-democracy I had never even heard of people like Steve Sailer or Chris Ford, let alone had the opportunity to read their racist drivel on a daily basis…

4: That said, for a public figure to use such a colloquialism, especially one that it likely to be interpreted as an insult, in a public forum is pretty stupid.

Yup, as always, this seems way more complicated than it needs to be. A white guy in his 40s calling a black guy in his 40s “boy” is almost certainly racist. There’s a slight chance that it isn’t: maybe where the white guy grew up, everyone called everyone else “boy” no matter how well they know each other. That doesn’t seem to apply here because Davis didn’t grow up in the south and all the “ol’ boy” examples I’ve seen are among friends and Davis and Obama aren’t, but whatever. But even then, it’s so stupid and so easily misinterpreted that even if the white guy isn’t racist, he’s an utter moron. You might as well call Obama’s health care policy “niggardly” or say “let’s call a spade a spade” when arguing that his political beliefs have been obfuscated. Neither expression is racial in meaning or origin, but how stupid would you have to be to use them in those contexts?

Coming form a middle aged White Republican from KY, it’s Racist with a capitol R wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt and hastily stuffing a white hood into the closet.

Barack Obama does not approve this message and neither should you. If you don’t see that statement as judgmental and hypocritical, then I don’t know what to say to you.

The only person I can think of who can get away with calling adult men “that boy” is Dick Button. A friend was complaining about his calling female skaters “girls.” I pointed out that he called the male skaters “boys.”

He gets away with it because he picked up the habit back in the elden days, he has clearly been told not to do it (you can tell from the pause he puts in front of “young men”), but sometimes is so overcome he can’t help it – “that boy is just magnificent!”

But did Cyrus use them or mention them?

I was going to mention that Kevin Drum’s commentators were the worst ever, but They seem to be moderating now.

I’ve got to say that without knowing more about Davis, it just doesn’t seem quite so cut-and-dried to me. I’ve heard the locution ‘that boy’ in the south applied to adult whites, particularly by their elders, at least a few times.

Now, I’m no southerner, so admittedly there may be situational subtleties (similar to those pointed out at no. 32, above, e.g.) in the instant case I’m not hip to that mark this deployment of the phrase more clearly racist as-applied. (And of course the whole point of being “subtle” in this way often is to make the code conveniently deniable.) But then neither Belle nor Matt (and you know I love you both) is aware of these subtleties either, which means their certitude isn’t justified.

Huh … Yes, mds, you are right — he didn’t use the term “old.” My mistake.

Honestly, though, my comment was not intended to defend this bastard. It was more to find common ground with those who said “me use this term all the time down South and we don’t mean anything by it.” You can accept that without denying the racist use of the term, and while acknowledging its offensiveness.

“we use” dammit.

mr. bill wrote: “(All while Obama would be fretting about if there would be enough ice and disposable diapers to go around – as firestorms raged, radioactivity spread, and people wondered what city would be nuked next)”

Uh, yeah. Who put the bombs on the ships? Ships are often registered in countries totally unrelated to the ownership, the operators of a ship aren’t necessarily the owners, and the cargo wasn’t necessarily the property of the operators.

So who are you and this dumbass Republican going to attack?

Meanwhile, the economic infrastructure of two large areas have been wiped out, in a manner that nobody in the US has ever had to deal with, and people and buildings for hundreds of miles downwind have been effected and need to be identified and treated. Each nuked city and its environs will make Katrina look like a picnic.

If swift, competent action isn’t taken quickly, the death toll will rise significantly and people will continue being hurt over time.

Meanwhile, if the nukes are coming in on boats, then it isn’t that hard to screen out further attacks, and the targets are limited.

Regarding the claim above that Sailer is a “supremacist”, he explains his position here:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/051120_response.htm

But, banning him would definitely be the rightthing to do.

Meanwhile, if the nukes are coming in on boats, then it isn’t that hard to screen out further attacks, and the targets are limited.

Yes. On 9/11 they made all the planes land. In this hypothetical, you tell all the ships to turn around (and sink the ones that don’t).

And how does incinerating the (hypothetical) controller, even granting the assumption that you know who he is, stop the (hypothetical) in-transit attacks.

I repeat my questions: Was Davis a participant in this exercise? If so, who picked him and why? If not, who told him about it?

“Deputy sheriff said to me
Tell me what you come here for, boy.”

It’s all about power. ‘Boy’ doesn’t equate to ‘nigger’, not exactly, instead it was an explicit recognition that under Jim Crow southern rules to be a white man or even a white boy gave you explicit social and verbal superiority over every black man. It is why he was Uncle Tom to your son and your twelve year old white son was Mr. William to him.

It is certainly possible for a white southerner to be placed in that same power position, if you get pulled over by an erstwhile Boss Hogg or end up in a jail cell well there you are. Which is exactly why ‘boy’ in context is so offensive, it signals that the target is simply powerless to counter.

In the seminal western novel ‘The Virginian’ all of the characters swear like, like well like cowboys. And in most cases ‘you son of a bitch!’ is just taken like the modern equivalent of ‘wassup!’ Except in the one case where it almost led to deadly violence and drew the response ‘You better be smiling when you say that’.

Because in the end you can’t extract the intent out of intentionality, the meaning really is in the use. And I suspect everyone in that room understood the intent, the meaning and the usage of ‘boy’. There probably is not a single vulgarism that is not used among peers in a crude but affectionate way, but the key word is ‘peers’. ‘Boy’ is a nominally neutral word that was and in some places is used to verbally mark a presumed imbalance in power. It is the same dynamic that allows the Frat Boy in Chief to publicly call his chief political advisor Turd Blossom. I don’t expect that Karl liked that much but he wasn’t in a position to respond in kind.

Europeans have explicitly recognized this in their language. In French it even has a verb ‘tutoyer’. Who is ‘tu’ to you and who is ‘vous’ to me and vice versa is not just a tongue twister but governs interpersonal relations, there are rules. I don’t know if French jailers typically use ‘tu’ in relation to their prisoners but it wouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Much like it would to everybody everywhere else if a large politician called Timothy was referred to slyly as a big Tim :)

I give up — what does this mean to everyone everywhere else? (There was at least one American politician called Big Tim — IIRC according to Joseph Mitchell’s profile of Commodore Dutch Big Tim Sullivan was Dutch’s patron before he (Big Tim) went mad.

John Emerson, I have no doubt the epithet is categorically condescending. The question, though, is whether it’s categorically racist. And the contention that it is categorically racist would at least seem to be disconfirmed (would it not?) by the fact that it is frequently applied by whites to whites (and, for that matter, by blacks to blacks).

#71, large caps aren’t terribly probative either.

Q, whatever your discipline is incapacitates you for talking about social questions. Stick to what you’re good at.

To fill in the blanks: no one said anything about anything being “categorically racist”. What we’ve been saying is it’s racist for an adult white man to refer to an adult black man as “boy”. Beyond that, we’ve been saying that it’s a clear case and not a tough call, and that people who say otherwise are either quibblers, ignorant, crypto-racists, or all three.

No one has said that it’s racist every time one adult calls another adult “boy”. There might even be rare exceptions when an adult white man can jokingly call a an adult black man “boy” without racism, but this is dependent on a well-established close personal relationship of equality and respect between them, which is not the case here.

You also seem to be saying that it’s impossible to understand the meanings of words people say without knowing what’s going on in their minds, but this is a long-refuted fallacy.

I just elucidated, you whiner.

This is like when certain white people somehow can’t understand why Blacks can use a variant of the n-word as a term of affection and they cannot (without getting into the differences between the -er ending and the -a ending). The proper response is always, “why do you even care? Unless you WANT to be able to describe Black people with that word”.

Jon h at #67: the ‘fretting’ remark was a quote from an Iglesias commenter, see the post just below, I got the blockquote tags in wrong.

I think we need to know what’s up with this top secret war game stuff, especially if this idiot Davis has blown the lid on something.
The quoted bit was:He said in his remarks at the GOP dinner that he also recently participated in a “highly classified, national security simulation” with Obama.
“I’m going to tell you something: That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” Davis said. “He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country.”

That is troubling. Obama famously failed open on the matter of nuclear attack in an early debate.

He was given a scenario where ships bearing nuclear bombs unexpectedly blew up two major cities. Obama’s response was that as President, he would focus on the 1st Responders, ensuring they had the respurces and tools to cope with “people in need”. The others wisely said they were Commander in Chief, their 1st responsibility was to defend the nation and strike back at the enemy responsible for killing millions of Americans before other American cities were eradiacted. (All while Obama would be fretting about if there would be enough ice and disposable diapers to go around – as firestorms raged, radioactivity spread, and people wondered what city would be nuked next)

These national security exercises include key decision-makers and people considered plausible future decision-makers. Both military, and potential future civilian leaders of the military. With Obama, the odds on favorite to be the next President, an obvious selection

Crud John, I’m an idiot. The quote begins at “He said”, and seems to be from that Davis idiot. It’s a major league smear. And if not as awful as the racist use of ‘boy’, it stinks to high heaven. And I agree with your analysis.
I just didn’t understand how tags work here.

There is no absolute racism in the use of “boy,” thought the utterer left little wiggle room given the audience and context. But there is a little. Just as “good ol” can modify “boy,” in this case “boy” modifies “finger on the button” possibly in several ways. I know it’s shocking to some that there are still racists and racial overtones in this day and age, and as sad and often pathetic as it is, it is, and has been for oh, about as long as we’ve been able to distinguish between the others, wherever they come from or however they look. Like that old parable thingy where one turns the other cheek, a slap is only an insult if the slapped one allows it to be, otherwise it’s generally just a sign of fear and ignorance.

I have no doubt the epithet is categorically condescending. The question, though, is whether it’s categorically racist.

Aggressive condescension is one of the non-lethal ways that Southern racism has historically operated.

The background knowledge is that it’s a white Southerner talking to other white southerners about a black man to who he is not at all friendly. No other information is needed. Understanding that is pretty much essential to being competent to talk about racism in any context, including American politics. It’s intro level. Your “not knowing enough” is a fact about you, not a fact about Davis or about what Davis said.

Your ruinous methodology would simply rule out any discussion of racist (and other) “dog-whistle” messages, which are meant to be heard only by the few, and also would rule out instantly-disavowed “planting the seed” messages, which get the message out there — things like “I wouldn’t go sao far as to say that Obama is a Marxist [or Muslim]”. (Examples not involving Obama are easily found, and it isn’t just about racism and sexism that these games are played.)

I believe that I am correct that it’s your methodology which incapacitates you for this kind of discussion. Whether or not the far-fetched hypotheticals, counterfactual assumptions, and abstruse quibbles characteristic of analytic philosophy are intrinsically valuable in their own terms, they wreak havoc on real-world discussions. In a real-world context, arguing about whether it’s racist for a white man to refer to a black man as “boy” is ignorant. The fact that the ignorance is shared is not a defense.

John, do you think your claim that my “ruinous methodology would simply rule out any discussion of racist (and other) ‘dog-whistle’ messages” squares with my conclusion in the Trent Lott case?

Righteous bubba, I think that point came just about right before I posted my first comment. Good piling on, though.

This Davis guy sounds like an archie-bunker-style ignorant fool. Sure, let’s call him racist, but then how do we classify a neonazi skinhead?

Re john emerson’s comment “The background knowledge is that it’s a white Southerner talking to other white southerners about a black man to who he is not at all friendly. No other information is needed”————-

1) How about the information that John Emerson evidently can’t read a map? Is that relevent?

2) As I noted over on the Yglesias thread, my family has been in Kentucky for 200 years and i had ancestors who fought on the Union side. The Kentucky legislature elected in 1861 was overwhelming Pro-Union , ordered the Confederate—but not Union—forces out of Kentucky and raised the Union flag over the state capital.
It had more men killed in the Union Army than Connecticut or New Hampshire.
See citations here:
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/04/integrity.php#comment-1872783

3) Moreover, Geoff Davis’s District borders on Indiana and Ohio across the river. That’s Midwest,not South. Although if it helps you rationalize your prejudices, redraw the map.

yeah, well I’m amazed that you’re amazed…no, that’s a lie. but I was actually surprised to see people straight-up defending the use of “boy” to an adult black man as not necessarily racist. it’s like olde timey racism from the days of yore.

Oh jeez. You really need to get out of whatever cloister you’re in.

“Southerner” is a pretty flexible term, and I don’t give a shit about your ancestors. Kentucky isn’t Midwestern, period. It was a slaveholding state and sent troops to both sides.

Sglover — you’re full of shit, boy.

Sglover—you’re full of shit, boy.

I’m convinced!

You gonna tell me you have NEVER encountered the usages I mention? Since you’re such an expert on being full of shit, and so forth….

Glover, it’s been explained above, at great length, in what context those usages are not racist. (above all, they’re not racist when addressed to a white man, though there’s more). Someone above said exactly what you said, and we explained things to him.

As explained, your “mind reading” dig is all wrong. we’re talking about meaning and usage.

How small a minority? The government was divided and the COnfederates boycotted after a certain point. Are you saying that almost none of them fought the Confederacy? My reference said that in Kentucky it was brother against brother.

In any case Kentuckians know enough of Southern ways to know what “boy” means in reference to a black guy.

Don Williams @104: this is not about geography, but a sort of cultural “South”. The ‘South’ is not just an area, it’s a culture and a mindset. See J.W. Cash’s The Mind of the South…
Areas that were not good for the Confederacy during the War between the States have been swallowed up inC the southern mindset: ‘not Yankees’, ‘country folk’, Commercial Country Music, ‘real americans’ (i.e. white), with a dose of hellraising and NASCAR.
I live a part of Georgia that was often antiConfederate (the next county over is called Union, for that reason) but now proudly waves the Stars and Bars. I’ve seen similar Dixification of Kentucky and West Virginia (! in a real historical irony) as well as southern Illinois and Indiana.
It’s a false history, the moonlight and magnolia’s myths of a lost Country of Cavaliers, and happy darkies singin’…It finds its clearest expression in the racist romance novel Gone with the Wind and it’s movie version. The real history was bad, one of the long sellout of Blacks by Northern politicians as the South imposed the Jim Crow and Lynching eras, and the economic Bourbons made corrupt deals with the Northern Financial interests. By flogging these myth, aided and abetted by popular culture, a White identity politics is the basis of the Conservative movement in much of the country, precisely what Obama stumbled on in his ‘guns and religion’ speech.. It’s bigoted and reactionary. And it’s what Mr. Davis is selling.

Re John Emerson’s comment “The [Civil War] government [of Kentucky] was divided ”
————
NO, It was NOT.
Read my lips.

Kentucky tried to mediate and head off the Civil War. ONCE the war started, the 1861 elections returned a Kentucky legislature in which PRO-UNION delegates outnumbered Confederate sympathizers 76–24 in the House and 27–11 in the Senate. That’s probably better than what you could get in the US Congress today.

See .e.g,.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_in_the_American_Civil_War#Elections_of_1861

Sglover:

The whole point is that it doesn’t *take* mind reading to reasonably infer racism in Davis’s comment.

See Holbo’s Comment #10.

The whole point is that it doesn’t take mind reading to reasonably infer racism in Davis’s comment.

I’m impressed that so many books and movies are instantly rendered that much less comprehensible.

Also: “love” is a score in tennis.

I’ve been reading press coverage, some WashPost articles, about the Obama “bitter” comment, and now I’m reading the comments on these blogs about Davis’ comments. The one thing that strikes me is that, in the anti-Obama remarks I’ve read (not too many pro-Obama commenters), nobody said, “I’m from Geneva/Erie/Gary/Columbus and nobody here is ‘bitter’” underneath George Will or Eugene Robinson. Half the comments I’ve seen on Davis are of the “I’m from KY and you just don’t know how we are down here!” sort.

That’s because there wasn’t a degenerating wave of ignorance lashed at Pennsylvania in the wake of those comments. According to many judgmental commenters here, everyone in the South sits around listening to Toby Keith with a heart that is filled with hate. I’ve somehow lost all hope that many here will see the irony in their “fight intolerance with intolerance” attitudes. Perhaps you guys are jealous at Southerners’ superiority in their ways of charming your ladies ;)

By the way, hypersensitivity to racial issues isn’t appreciated by most black people I know. It has demeaning undertones that you think they need your high and mighty help. Just sayin’.

According to many judgmental commenters here, everyone in the South sits around listening to Toby Keith.

Do you have something against Toby Keith, motherfucker? Curb your own prejudice!

Heard the one about Senator Byrd? Coming right up!

touche, John E. @ 123! my house is glass, indeed.

”Heard the one about Senator Byrd?”

Byrd and Rocky; what more could a state wish for?

it is said of kentucky that it was the only state to join the confederacy after the civil war. the metadata of the website of rebel yell whisky informs us that “Rebel Yell, the Spirit of the South, is a fine, wheated, straight bourbon whiskey created from a traditional Kentucky recipe to be enjoyed by all.”

but snark aside, i’m not sure why a state has to have been in the confederacy to be considered part of “the south”. by way of example, is west virginia a southern state? of course it is.

I’m amazed so many people are going on about saying the way Southerners talk. Davis was born in Montreal Canada. If he was inclined to say good old boy, it would probably come out more like mon vieux.

What his voice pattern seems to be like normally is reproduced in this story about him in the Cincinnati paper from the last race he ran, back in 2006:

One student wanted to know what President Bush was like.

“He’s a real guy,” Geoff Davis assured his young audience at St. Agnes School in Fort Wright. “Whether you agree with him or disagree with him, he’s genuine. He’s real.”

Another wanted to know whether Davis himself would like to be president someday. “No,” came the congressman’s quick reply.”

This is not a man who says Bush is a good old boy. I’ve lived in the South most of my life, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Southerner – of the type that says Good old boy – say, he’s a real guy. That’s very Yankee. It is truly not too hard to see that Davis is consciously mimicking a Southernism by using the word boy with Obama, but couching it in such a way as to retain deniability. This isn’t really that hard to see, unless you are trying awful hard not to see it.

“i’m not sure why a state has to have been in the confederacy to be considered part of “the south.”

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

Aggressive condescension is one of the non-lethal ways that Southern racism has historically operated.

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.

We tend not to go on and on…

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

75: Much like it would to everybody everywhere else if a large politician called Timothy was referred to slyly as a big Tim :)
I give up—what does this mean to everyone everywhere else?

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.

Ah thanks.

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.)

Olive branch? not laurel or myrtle?

145: very good.

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 was working on an IT project in South Africa at the end of the 90s. Over there, what we (at least in the UK) call floppy disks (the 3-and-a-half inch variety), they refer to as “stiffys”. The 5-and-a-quarter inch truly floppy disks are “floppys”.

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

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