Cabs of San Diego – Home Boy Cab
Home Boy Cab.
A catchy name to some, not particularly enticing to others. What exactly is a ‘home boy,’ anyway? The formal version of “homie?” Consider:
Homie (or homey) is a contraction of the American slang words “homeboy” or “homebuddies” which became prevalent among some of the youth in Latino and African American communities starting in the late 1960s and continuing up to the present, particularly in the hip hop subculture.
Does this mean the Home Boy cab misspelled his name? Even wiki has it spelled as “homeboy.” Moreover, Home Boy lacks the useless, theft inducing accessories I would expect of a taxi cab playing upon hip hop / urban slang. Yes, Home Boy Cab must be . . . something else.
An exhaustive .28 second search of the internet for use of the term “Home Boy” in recent literature reveals a 2009 novel, Home Boy, by H. M. Naqvi. According to Lee Siegal, author, Love in a Dead Language, Home Boy is
“[a] marvelous literary achievement shaped by a refreshingly humane, irresistibly cool, and distinctly curried sensibility. From the word go, Home Boy is populated by larger-than-life characters and big ideas. It will make you think, laugh out loud, possibly cry, and at times, dance with joy. You won’t even notice that H. M. Naqvi has redefined South Asian literature.”
“[a] genre busting, page-turning debut, HOME BOYfuses street slang and literary discourse, pop culture and politics, history and comedy, East and West. Ultimately, though, HOME BOY is a thoughtful story about a boy who becomes a man in these fraught and frightening times.”
All can be