All over America, infuriating white people would address black men with the words “Hey, boy.” And it grated. It really grated. That’s why, in the 194… - Mark Forsyth

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All over America, infuriating white people would address black men with the words “Hey, boy.” And it grated. It really grated. That’s why, in the 1940s, black Americans started taking the fight the other way and greeting each other with the words “Hey, man.” The vocative was not inserted for the purposes of sexual identification; it was a reaction against all those years of being called boy. It worked. White people were so confused by “Hey, man” that the sixties happened and everybody, of whatever race, started calling each other man, until the original significance was lost. This is an example of Progress. Now,

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Additional quotes by Mark Forsyth

Wouldst like to con a glimmer with me this early black?’, which he [Cab Calloway] helpfully explains as ‘the proper way to ask a young lady to go to the movies’. It should be noted here, that if the object of your affections replies ‘Kill me’, they are not requesting to be euthanatised and you should not actually murder them. Kill me is merely the Cab Calloway way of saying ‘Show me a good time’ and is the best response you could have hoped for. Jive was rather confusing in this way.

But Shakespeare never drank coffee. Nor did Julius Caesar, or Socrates. Alexander the Great conquered half the world without even a café latte to perk him up. The pyramids were designed and constructed without a whiff of a sniff of caffeine. Coffee was introduced to Europe only in 1615. The achievements of antiquity are quite enough to cow the modern human, but when you realize that they did it all without caffeine it becomes almost unbearable.

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