The Etymology of Boss
Boss arrived in American English through the Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam, where baas meant master of a ship or workshop. For nearly two centuries it stayed a regionalism, but after 1830 it conquered the country: Americans, particularly workers in the rapidly industrialising north, refused to call any free man master and reached for the Dutch import instead. Washington Irving popularised it in print, and by the Civil War boss was standard. The word soon spawned political senses too — the boss of a city machine, the party boss — capturing the half-admiring, half-resentful American attitude toward concentrated power. Twentieth-century slang gave us the adjectival use (a boss car, that's boss) meaning excellent, first among Black jazz musicians and then mainstream youth culture by the 1950s.