“The Man” is a term used to describe those in power, often seen as oppressors. It originated in African American slang and gained popularity in the 1960s among countercultural groups fighting against government oppression. It can also be used positively to describe someone at the pinnacle of their craft. Common phrases include “The man is holding you down” and “sticking it to the man.”
“The Man” is a term used to describe any person or organization in power. It can be applied by blacks to describe whites in power, or it can be applied by any countercultural movement to describe the group they see as the oppressor. Many people will also describe their boss as “The Man,” especially when there is a perceived case of oppression or domination.
As a positive term, “The Man” can be used to describe someone who is at the pinnacle of his craft, or who in some way possesses a perceived superiority over all others. This sense of the word dates back to at least the mid-19th century, when it is present in many written texts. This sense of “The Man” in the modern world is primarily connected to African American slang, but has become more pervasive throughout society in recent years and is now heard frequently in many segments of American culture.
The first recorded use of the phrase “The Man” to describe a boss figure occurs in 1918, but the phrase is likely to have originated much earlier. Some historians have suggested that “The Man” was an abbreviation of the phrase “Bank Man” used by African Americans in the post-Civil War South, describing someone who constantly nagged them for not making payments on time. The term then became generalized to anyone who annoyed a group of people, and eventually just anyone in a position of dominance who was perceived as an abuser.
While it had been used for decades prior, it wasn’t until the 1960s that “The Man” began to see widespread use in the United States. It was used early on by the black militant movement to describe the white oppressors the movement was fighting against. A number of newspaper quotes of the time use the term, and it quickly gained popularity, both among black activists and those who fought in solidarity with them.
In the late 1960s “The Man” was being used by several countercultural groups to describe the perceived oppressors they were fighting against. Most often “The Man” described the government or a specific government group, but it could also be applied to a single individual, seen as particularly representative of wider oppressive policies. The term can also be used to describe an amorphous and unspecified agency of oppression held responsible for any number of evils in the world.
There are a number of common phrases that use the term, generally in a pejorative sense. For example, if you feel like your life isn’t going according to plan or that you can’t get a break, you might say that, “The man is holding you down.” This implies that an outside force is actively trying to stop you from being successful. When you start to fight against an established force in the world, especially in a radical or protest-oriented way, you might talk about “sticking it to the man”.
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