Posted on 11/03/2007 6:59:32 AM PDT by BnBlFlag
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Saturday, November 3, 2007 Pride & Prejudice: What does 'Yankee' mean to you?
Southerners reserve three insults for outlanders and assorted other pathetic creatures. They are:
"Bless your heart" "Y'all ain't from around here, are you?" "Yankee"
This blog is barely two weeks old, but it has already taken a few pot-shots at some sacred cows, such as "bait-and-wait" deer-hunting, litterbugs and low expectations in some local schools. The ensuing conversations have largely been delightfully rambunctious, but a few visitors have registered their disagreement by simply invoking the "Yankee" Doctrine: You ain't one of us, so shut the f*** up.
It's not always aimed at carpetbagging pantywaists from states that fought for the Union 132 years ago. Fourteen states were established after the Civil War, mostly in the West, which didn't have a dog in that fight, so there are tens of millions of Americans who never set foot on a Civil War battleground, period. And the last real Yankee has been dead for 51 years (Albert Woolson of Minnesota was a Union drummer boy who died in 1956.)
No, it seems that to a grumpy Southerner a "Yankee" is anyone who "ain't from around here." "Yankee" is never a term of endearment. That epithet is fired like a squirrel-shot at any outsider who doesn't leave his/her native sensibilities at the Mason-Dixon line ... or who doesn't agree with the insulter. ("You don't like grits? What a Yankee!")
That kind of xenophobia didn't hunt before the Civil War, it didn't wash in the civil rights era, and it's unlikely to work in the blogosphere. It might surprise those parochial Southerners who still wield the word like a revenooer's axe, but non-Southerners are rarely insulted by the term. They merely know you're trying to be insulting.
And for the record: The outlanders' habit of calling all Southerners "bubba" or "redneck" or "hillbilly" is equally xenophobic. I'm afraid the American tendency to coin a slur is infinite and knows no geographical bounds. And if you're lucky enough to be a non-Southerner living in the South, then you hear ALL of them!
So, Gator-Baiters, educate this Yankee from Wyoming who loves Texas. What exactly is a "Yankee"? Can you describe what you see in your mind when you use or hear the term? Whether you're a native Southerner or a lifelong Manhattanite, why do you think this apparently archaic term is still so widely used in the new millennium?
Posted by GATOR at 3:25 AM
Labels: epithets, insults, prejudice, Southeast Texas, Texas, Yankee
1 Gator-baiting comments: buddy said... I'm "not from around here", either, and when I arrived here nearly 30 years ago, got the 'damn yankee' comment from some of the locals. Annoying, but expected, considering some of the Gomers who live in the backwoods.
November 3, 2007 8:07 AM Post a Comment
TheBayou@BeaumontEnterprise.com wildfires Write Your Own Caption Yankee
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BFD
>>Traditionally Yankee was most often used to refer to a New Englander (in which case it may suggest Puritanism and thrifty values), but today refers to anyone coming from a state north of the Mason-Dixon line, with a specific focus still on New England. However, within New England itself, the term refers more specifically to old-stock New Englanders of English descent.
You can get more specific than that, and in an illuminating way, by repairing to Robert MacNeil's The Story of English, which he co-authored with Robert McCrum and William Cran about seven or eight years ago, following in H. L. Mencken's footsteps but much more concisely and (necessarily) less encyclopedically (Mencken's massive The American Language is still a manual reference.)
MacNeil points to the origins in East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk) of many Bay State settlers, who left England before the English Civil War (Jacobites and High Church, gentle-born Cavaliers from western England versus Low Church and Scottish Kirk commoners, a.k.a. "roundheads" for their short haircuts, whose pikemen and musketeers rallied behind Cromwell and his New Model Army).
Inhabitants of Anglia have a number of characteristics often remarked in Bay State Yankees: they are dour, closemouthed, acquisitive and directive -- they will get in your face about just about anything. The word "Yankee" means all that, but signifies as well the Yankee habit of trying to take all your money and then use it to beat you over the head.
In short, they are unpleasant people on either side of the pond, and we're stuck with more of them. Worse, they got into the banks and government, and we've been beaten over the head with our own money for 160 years now.
You're an optimist. lol
“Whatever.” — lentulusgracchus)
North: 1
South: 0
Halftime
Yankee: A visitor to the South that hails from above the Mason-Dixon Line.
Damn Yankee: A visitor to the South that hails from above the Mason-Dixon Line and refuses to return home again.
Arrogant? Insulting? Smug?
It sounds like a "DamnYankee" is the sort of person who can't have a discussion without calling someone else a "douche-bag" or telling them they have their heads up their *sses.
How about we talk about "f***ingjack*ssConfederates." Not every Southerner is a f***ingjack*ssConfederate, but some of you sure are.
N-S especially. I am convicned he is a liberal.
Which begs the question, why did you nned to ask in the first place?
Let me guess. Southern public school system, right?
Okay asswipe ...so I”m dyslexic. Your still an idiot.
“nned”.....is that a word, or another northern asswipe expression?
Dyslexic, dimwitted, dumb, and that's just the 'd's.
Lol!
Yankee
1683, a name applied disparagingly by Du. settlers in New Amsterdam (New York) to English colonists in neighboring Connecticut. It may be from Du. Janke, lit. "Little John," dim. of common personal name Jan; or it may be from Jan Kes familiar form of "John Cornelius," or perhaps an alt. of Jan Kees, dial. variant of Jan Kaas, lit. "John Cheese," the generic nickname the Flemings used for Dutchmen. It originally seems to have been applied insultingly to Dutch, especially freebooters, before they turned around and slapped it on the English. A less-likely theory is that it represents some southern New England Algonquian language mangling of English. In Eng. a term of contempt (1750s) before its use as a general term for "native of New England" (1765); during the American Revolution it became a disparaging British word for all American native or inhabitants. Shortened form Yank in reference to "an American" first recorded 1778.
Here's another. Source
The Earliest usage of Yankee cites from the 1680s. It was a nickname used among the Dutch pirates of the Spanish Main. There were pirates named Yankee Dutch (1683), Captain Yankey (1684), and Captain John Williams (Yankee) (1687). The next earliest reference is an estate inventory from 1725 listing a slave named Yankee.
During the French and Indian war the British General James Wolfe, hero of the battle of Quebec, took to referring derisively to the native New Englanders in his army as Yankees. He is attributed with the first recorded usage of the term for general Americans and it was derogatory.
The word "Yankee" seems to have often been a term of contempt throughout history. Still is.
Enemies of America and American values have long been hurt by underestimating Yankees, be it 1776, 1861 or 1941.
Attention: I am personally requesting that everyone ignore this idiot, and his anti-southern rantings. Believe me, his head would explode if everyone would do just that.
He is nothing more than a liberal slug, and needs to be treated no better. Ignore him, and he will go away.
I liked your etymological footwork very much, your cites go back farther than anything I'd ever seen previously and leave open only the mystery about whether it's originally "Janke"/"little John" or "Jan Kaas"/"Cheesehead".
I might add, that Anglo-Dutch privateering stations were truly binational efforts and their remains show the presence of nationals of both England and the Netherlands. I attended a lecture some 20 years ago, that I think I told you about on some other thread, in which some apparent plague graves were discovered in Houston and tentatively associated with one of the unlocated privateering plantations on the Gulf of Mexico that battened on the Spanish silver fleets.
By the way, these privateering stations were indeed "plantations" in the original sense of the word as it was meant by the Portuguese and Spanish, viz., a farming outpost operated as both safe haven and ship-chandling station for the early voyages of trade and exploration. The island of Fernando Poo, off the African coast near the mouth of the Congo, is usually cited as the first such, and it was to keep that plantation in labor that the slave trade with the African kingdoms on the mainland (already in business for generations) first went offshore.
Thanks for the good post, I promptly copied it and sent it to a cousin-in-law (who happens to have been born Dutch and is now on her third nationality).
There. Fixed it.
Oh, and I'm calling Godwin on the reference to 1941 and the bracketing of Jeffersonians and Southern Jeffersonians in particular with National Socialism (again), something that you seem incapable of controlling yourself about. You should really see someone about that verbal incontinence.
Game over. Thanks for playing.
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