Yeah, that tracks. She sounds like a sweetheart . It’s deprecated, but it’s not like a memo went out. It was much more common when I was a kid, I remember my grandfather griping about it and trying to make the change.

We moved North recently and I’m having the same problem with a different term. Lots of Italian in the area. I’ve always pronounced it eye-talian, it’s not a racist thing, I’m just a redneck and that’s what I learned. Some people find it offensive, so I’m trying to change it.

Well, I guess they find it offensive when they can understand me. Feels like I’m speakig a different language from everyone around here a lot of the time. I have an easier time talking to black folks than I do white, dialect is much closer. I regularly get jaw-drop suprise when I’m in public and say something.

Also having a hell of a time with Yes Ma’am/Yes Sir as there is high trans/enby representation in my social scene. I just apologize and move on. Southern charm and politness is a huge help.

I’m mostly self educated and my speech patterns are so stereotypically deep southern that most people assume I’m backwards. I was mostly raised in a Sundown town. All those inbred jokes and such. Black folks pick up that I’m not backwards faster than white because they understand me better. I find language and dialect fascinating, do a lot of involuntary code switching. When bullshitting with a group of white men around here, when I get comfortable, I unconsciously drop into full redneck speech and they really have a hard time understanding me.

As for colored, the below image is a good representation of why the term is problematic, it was used on Jim Crow signs. Calling a black man, “colored boy” is fighting words and roughly equivalent to the N word. I refer to white men as boys all the time but unless it is a mixed race group, I do not refer to black men as boy.