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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2985 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I just realized that the closer you get to New England, the more specific a background "Yankee" denotes. Overseas, it means an American. In the US it means someone from the Northeast. In the Northeast it specifically refers to someone from New England. I assume that this regresses further, and that in New England it refers to someone from Massachusetts, where it refers to someone from Boston, that within Boston it refers to a specific neighborhood, and that within that neighborhood resides the One True Yankee.

I'm agnostic as to whether it's a hereditary title or one that comes with the house.

Obligatory E.B.White quote for whenever this comes up:

To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.

What's up with "pie for breakfast?" Lazy googling reveals this possible reason:

Like most jokes, that one’s based on a kernel of truth. UVM history professor Dona Brown has written about how the tourists who came to spend the summer on Vermont farms during the late nineteenth century were upset about the pies and doughnuts that farm wives served for breakfast. Didn’t Vermont farm families eat fresh fruit and cream and vegetables? The visitors thought so, and so farm families adjusted their menus to accommodate their guests.

When back-to-the-land advocates Helen and Scott Nearing moved to Vermont during the 1930s, they found their own vegetarian, largely raw diet at odds with the local foodways. According to the Nearings, their Vermont neighbors ate pie, doughnuts, and cake “for two if not three meals a day” while they didn’t bake a single pie the entire twenty years they lived in Vermont.

Based on the above, I'm guessing "eats pie for breakfast" translates to Southern culture as something like "eats fried bologna and mayo sandwiches for breakfast," connoting "backward and low class."

That's an interesting observation. But I believe at some point you would get to a small enough region that the term stops being used altogether, IOW at some point it doesn't regress any further, because it's a term outsiders use to represent a group that differs from them along the "Yankee" axis, but eventually if you zoom in geographically you get a group too coherent in the "Yankee" sense that they wouldn't want to stratify themselves further along "Yankee" lines, if that makes sense. I guess you could call that the origin of the Yankee axis. Like "New Yorker" might regress to mean a dweller of New York City once you're inside NY state, but it can't regress any further...at that point you're at the origin of the NewYorker axis, even though the "origin point" has been expanded beyond a single geographical point to include an entire city of hundreds of square miles. This feels like a conversation from Seinfeld.

I thought that New Englanders used it to mean someone from New York, and New Yorkers used it to mean the baseball team.

I haven't met anyone who favours a more specific definition than "New Englander".

That said, when talking to Americans, I have heard "Yankee" used to refer to a widely-hated baseball team playing in the Bronx and its fans far more often than I have heard it used to refer to New Englanders. Given that the Bronx is not part of New England, I suspect it makes "Northeasterner" the more correct meaning to a descriptivist.

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