Weird (because we’re in the same general area). I’ve heard it used recently with irony as you mention, but we’d have to go back to the mid 90s before I could think of teens regularly using it in a serious way, having long since dropped the “home” and just saying “that’s my boy.”
I am just genuinely amazed that someone would choose to read Dear Abby and then be surprised that she could would give advise that defies common sense. But, hey, different strokes…
Really? Awesome! Let’s chill sometimes, homeboy!
I’m 37. It is very possible that I am thinking of the slang I use with my own friends and not the slang the kids are using.
I’ve been involved with prison reform and advocacy and that was in no way written by a criminal. It sounds like it was written by a person who volunteered to help out with cons or ex-cons and is combining their experiences into a letter.
If it was written by a 16 year old, then it was a 16 year old student who was doing it for a high school sociology class
It generally takes years to come to terms with what you do. An older inmate may have written that letter and is thinking back to when he was 16. A 16 year old isn’t going to be broken down that fast.
I laughed my head off at the gangbanger letter - FOUR life sentences at age 16, was it? I don’t know that any advice columnist gives ‘good’ advice, it’s a matter of opinion, really. But that’s what the comments section (on the internet) is for. Look at the awful advice column at Salon.com, and Cary Tennis’ lofty meandering answers - it’s in the comments that you read anything useful. (I don’t see what’s so bad about Dear Abby, she’s not controversial, but she’s answered plenty of letters concerned with modern everyday life, from the kind of people who read newspapers, in a perfectly serviceable middle-of-the-road way.)
Just posting again to retract my earlier retractment. I just remembered a ton of hip hop songs that have the word ‘homeboy’, from Lil’ Wayne(yuck) to 50 Cent, and a ton of others. I am going to insist it is crossed over to normal language in slang, even for the kids.
Now run and tell that, homeboy!
*Those links go to those dodgy lyrics sites that crash the damn browser.
What even makes you think she was hoodwinked? Looks more to me like she wrote the letter herself.
You have to admit, it’s better than, “Please God, I’m Only Seventeen!” 
I like reading advice columns, just to see the stupid situations people get themselves into.
Hey, it’s just stupid talking to stupid. That letter is probably the closest most of “Dear Abby”'s core reading audience will ever get to “the hood”; they will eat it up, hook, line and sinker.
Yeah, that was the part in particular that set off my bullshit meter. Any kid that young that committed crimes so horrific that they would receive four life sentences would be all over the media.
[QUOTE=PlainJain]
Why in the fuck are you reading Dear Abby?
[/QUOTE]
It’s on the comics page. I read it for the laughs (like this one).
My mom was a sucker for such. Well, actually she was an Ann Landers fan…same glurge, different sister.
I get that, but have you ever read it and thought that an answer of hers was so out there that you felt the need to come scurrying back here and express shock that Abby doesn’t have any common sense?
Dear Abby gives marginally better advice than Carolyn Hax (Tell Me About It). On the other hand, Hax has managed to convince newspapers to reprint online discussions that have been somewhat edited whenever she wants to take a break from the hard work of telling people that they’re completely full of shit.
I dunno. I went to school in the barrio, with plenty of gang activity. It actually sounds a lot like the stuff the dudes who got locked up in county would say on those scared straight assemblies. Of course they were older than 16.
It’s possible the letter was dictated and that would explain the quality of the writing. Or it could have been edited. It’s actually keeping in line with how a 16 year old might describe a terrible crime - he doesn’t mention what he did or who he hurt. It’s pretty self involved.
So it may be fake - but it could be real, and someone in the kid’s life could have suggested Abby.
The link in the OP no longer takes you to the right column. This is the current link:
Can anyone find any case where all of the following are true?: The convicted person was 16 or less, they could be described as a gangbanger, they got four consecutive life sentences, and they are still relatively young (so cases that happened many decades ago don’t count). I can’t find anything in a quick search.
I love Ms. Hax’s column!
I have about 10 minutes to spend on a newspaper each morning (yeah, I’m 50, one of the old farts who still reads newspapers), and Dear Abby and/or Caroline Hax tends to appear right by my favorite comic strips. Sometimes I give them a glance.
Both give idiotic advice on a regular basis, but at least Hax seems to have some familiarity with the real world. The old Dear Abby showed none, and her daughter is no improvement.
Am I “surprised” that Abby is so clueless? No- but this was a particularly funny case (to me, at least). The letter was clearly the work of a naive middle-aged white person TRYING to imitate what he/she imagines a teenage thug sounds like. hey, I’m a middle aged, middle class white nerd myself, and even I know teenage punks don’t talk or write this way!
That “naive middle-aged white person” being Abby maybe?
I doubt that any nationally-syndicated columnist fakes the letters he or she receives, partly because he or she would be fired instantly if such a thing became public. And more importantly, I assume that nationally-syndicated columns receive far more letters each day than can be printed, so why would you need to do this?
At least they didn’t ship him off to the freak wharf.