Yeah, it's belittling from what I heard. I don't really fully understand anymore since the golden rule has long gone out the window (I wouldn't be offended if someone approached me and me friends and said "Hey, boys". Maybe be a bit uncommon but I wouldn't think much of it).

My hometown in Ireland has "Well, boy" as a colloqial greeting people use between each other. We had neither the empire of other european countries to bring black people here against their will, or the economic appeal to attract them willingly, so this is a term that evolved in a world relatively devoid of black people.

But, bring that to the US and greeting a black american with "boy" has a very different connotation. And there's totally valid reasons to do with local historical conditions that means that this is inappropriate to use in that context.

Does that make it wrong for people in my home town to greet each other like that? I don't think so. I think it's very uninclusive for Google to impose an american context where there is none.

The golden rule is a good starting point. As an abrasive person who doesn’t mind when people fight or argue at me, I tried to live by the golden rule and realized people want to be treated how they want to be treated, not how my autistic ass wanted to be treated.

In the same way the term “boy” is never really used insultingly, but people use “girly” or “stop being a little girl” as an insult all the time. So it makes sense that you wouldn’t be offended by the similar term, but some women may not like girls so much. I think this is reasonable and treating people how they want to be treated is the ultimate goal.

There’s a movie with Natalie Portman where she’s offended by a boy calling her a lady. She thinks she’s being called old.

There’s also what I’ll call the Jeremy Clarkson ooo hello ladies, reserved for fancy done up groups of ladies in nice dresses and hats for example from the country woman’s association.

Distinct from the oooo hello ladies of a group of prostitutes making their grand entrance from the back of a hummer I recently saw in the breaking bad movie.

Boys I’ve seen used a lot referring to groups of men in the examples of dogging the boys at a construction yard, pulled the boys for an scv rush in sc2, hello boyyys for Roy and HG implying something rude.