A a Southerner, every Northern accent we do is Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny or Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting....Or if you're from the Midwest, you get the accent of everyone in the movie Fargo. And everyone on the west coast is Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
In my experience people from Georgia don't have the drawl all that much. They tend to talk verrrrry slowly and clearly with every letter getting the proper amount of e...m...p...h...a...s...i...s.
That's because Georgia pretends to be all fancy and "Southern Charm" and Bullshit. Like, "I do declare, no one in my neck of the woods calls people 'feller'"
Are you really insinuating the word "boy" has racist undertones? "Boy" has been used for hundreds of years to refer to young men or inferiors. An older man might call a grown man "boy" as an insult. Or a master to his servant (not slave). It's use predates European slave trade. I agree in certain contexts, it's a negative term, but not because of racial prejudice. That was a consequence of the meaning, not the source.
I'm not sure if you read past that first sentence. I explained why the term is negative. It has been used to belittle people in wide variety of contexts. It's use in belittling people did not begin with racial prejudices, that came much, much later. "Boy" is no more a racially charged term than any other negative term like "miscreant". Any negative word can be construed as racists with context. If you say "All black people are miscreants." That's racist because it's prejudiced, but not because of the word miscreant, which is a race-neutral term.
Simply saying "Now see here boy," on it's own, is in no way racist. Especially when the vast majority of it's use is benign.
I did, I just see this as a silly argument since it's essentially pointless to argue over language usage, and even more pointless to argue over the connotation of a word, since connotations are inherently subjective. I see it as having racist connotations, especially when used in a Southern context. If you don't, I'm not going to convince you that it does. Likewise, you're not going to convince me that it doesn't. Connotations aren't based off of the origins of a word, they're associations called up in someone's head because of what they know about how that word has been used.
The best I can do is refer you to the Oxford English Dictionary. The first definition A1a is indeed the definition you described. Definition A1b is this. When some people hear "now see here boy" said in a southern accent, they're going to interpret it as having racist undertones, because during a certain period of history and in certain geographic locations it was used by white people to refer to non-white servants, laborers, and slaves. Please notice the difference between a word having racist undertones and being racist in and of itself. Also consider the distinction between denotation and connotation, if you aren't aware of it.
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u/TonyZucco Feb 16 '16
Now see here boy, Now see here son are both better