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| | Topical Words: Boss |
 | | If a worker says “Yes, boss!” to their manager in a British context, they’re being facetious, since nobody would really call their boss “boss” to his face (though it’s an extremely common term otherwise). |
| | This is a long way from the original meaning of boss, which came into the language in North America from the Dutch baas, “master”, which was taken there by Dutch settlers in the 1650s (and which also turns up in South African English, derived from Afrikaans). |
| | It is extremely unlikely that Mr Hague is intending the slang sense of boss that has become common among English-speaking young people recently, meaning “excellent, first-rate, superlative” (which started in the US at least as far back as the sixties, though some writers argue that it is a nineteenth-century formation, too). |
| www.worldwidewords.org /topicalwords/tw-bos1.htm (529 words) |
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