This Blog Has Gone South
Per the newbie shooter it takes three years of residency in the South, a gun safe, some ammo, some wine and a trip to Wal-Mart to make you officially Southern. Well, I got my ammo and my gun safe back in California, years before I moved north to the South, so the only thing that kept me from being a Southerner was the residency requirement. As of this instant I fulfilled it.
February 21st, 2009 at 9:19 am
[...] is officially a yankee instead of a damn yankee. Next, he’ll be drinking sweet tea every [...]
February 21st, 2009 at 10:23 am
[...] All the cool kids are doing it! [...]
February 21st, 2009 at 10:24 am
Lucky bastard. . . Some day I hope to be able to do the same. . .
February 21st, 2009 at 11:21 am
Is that all it takes? I moved to the South in 1969, my Mississippi relatives still call me “Yank”.
I’ll have to let them know….
Rustmeister´s last blog post..Where There’s Smoke….
February 21st, 2009 at 11:53 am
the real test is how do you answer the question, “Name the conflict that occurred in North America between 1860 and 1865, BCE?”
Civil War – Yankee
War of Northern Aggression – Southerner
February 21st, 2009 at 12:25 pm
My Daughter was born in Pittsburgh, in 1977. lived in Tennessee since 1978.
She is still a Damn Yankee.
The locals told her it works this way:
Yankee: someone from north of the Mason Dixon line.
Damn Yankee: A Yankee on the southern side of the Mason Dixon line who will not go back home.
My son is a first Generation Rebel, of disreputable Yank parentage –
my Ex is still a Damn Yankee even though she tried to assimilate by marrying a local and popping out another anchor baby, this time with rebel seed.
February 21st, 2009 at 12:26 pm
I still give my wife hell because she was born just North of the Mason-Dixon line, while I was born just South of it.
Of course, she doesn’t like sweet tea either, but at least she likes grits.
February 21st, 2009 at 12:31 pm
deadcenter, it’s a start. But if the answer is The California Indian Wars, The Navajo Wars, The Apache Wars, The Hualapai War, The Colorado War, The Dakota War, The Comanche War, or The Second Franco-Mexican War, you’d be both, either, or neither, and still be right. Lots of wars in North America.
February 21st, 2009 at 4:41 pm
"Yankee: someone from north of the Mason Dixon line.
Damn Yankee: A Yankee on the southern side of the Mason Dixon line who will not go back home."
That’s roughly the definition I was always told, though I always heard a slightly more condensed version.
A Yankee comes to visit. The Damn Yankee never leaves.
February 22nd, 2009 at 9:37 am
Yep, a yankee comes to visit the damn yankees never leave is how it was told to me.
Of course, my mother in law and sister in laws both say I’m the exception. That yankeeness is more a state of mind and manners than location and after 15 years they know I have the right attitude and the Yanks woud never take me back.
My father in law? Well, he was willing to accept me a bit more but then I turned down the offer to join the local SCV chapter and won’t let my sons join either.
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:08 am
Jeez, how the mighty have fallen. Do you at least still get out to California to visit?
February 23rd, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Where in the hell is California?
February 23rd, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Exactly.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
California is all around me and DirtCrashr. Look for the two red dots on a map.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:14 pm
A Southerner would never use the CE/BCE distinction. Further, 1865 BCE was around 3,874 years ago, so any conflict that happened at that time would have involved indigenous people.
/pedant
tgirsch´s last blog post..Quote of the Day, 2009-02-23
February 23rd, 2009 at 9:36 pm
What TGirsch said, but I’ll go one better: no American, Southern or otherwise, would say “CE” or “BCE.” Those abbreviations are for politically correct commies. Got a problem with the Christian calendar? Make your own God-damned calendar. Jesus Christ. As long as we’re going to use the year of his birth, give or take a few years, then call the dates what they are, BC and AD, for Christ’s sake.
Also missing from the list is the name for the war between the states if you are neither a Yankee nor a Southerner. For those of us with no dog in whatever the hell youse and y’all were fighting about back then, it’s best described as either the “war to kill 600,000 Americans to free four million a couple decades sooner than they would have been freed anyway” or the “war to preserve the U.S.’s forthcoming role as a/the superpower in the centuries to come.”
February 24th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Actually, “American Civil War” is the neutral description of the conflict fought between 1861 and 1865. A true Yankee would call it The War of the Rebellion — as in “The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion.”
March 6th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Xlrq says: “no American, Southern or otherwise, would say ‘CE’ or ‘BCE.’ Those abbreviations are for politically correct commies. Got a problem with the Christian calendar? Make your own God-damned calendar.”
Actually, Xlrq, we don’t need to invent a “non-AD” calendar. Why not use the Hebrew Calendar year “5621″ as the year the “War Between The States” started? Had Jesus been alive in 1861, according to the “Gregorian Calendar” most people then living in North America were then using, Apri1 12, 1861 would have been “2 Iyyar 5621.” And as far as any other date system being “God damned” according to you, I don’t think Jesus would have referred to his own calendar in that way.
As far as “politically correct” goes, my late father, his brother, and many thousands of other American Jews fought in World War Two to preserve to your family, and now you, the right to spout your own brand of bigotry and intolerance for the views of others, as you now do. My father was in the Army Air Force in England; my uncle was a G.I. on the ground who helped take the beaches of Normandy. Granted, had the Nazis won and taken over this country you might have been allowed to say what you did say here (though by now they might have outlawed Christianity since their God was “the State”) but I’m going to be an optimist about you and assume there are at least some things you’d like to say that the Nazis would have jailed or shot you for. So cut the “no American would say CE or BCE” crap.
A good article on the calendar is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era. I learned a few things I didn’t know, such as: For hundreds of years, the abbreviation “CE” has also been used for “Christian Era” and “BCE” to mean “Before the Christian Era”, so Xlrq has no RATIONAL reason to get so upset about those abbreviations being used instead of “AD” or “BC”. The same article also says that some Christian denominations, and even the Smithsonian Institution and other academic groups, have gone over to CE/BCE. You can use CE and BCE to mean whatever specific words you want them to mean, and so can I, but we both know what date we’re talking about. There are some things I would deride as based on an excess of “political correctness”, but this isn’t one of them. Isn’t it great to be living in a free country!
The only reason anyone needs to add something like “CE” or “AD” to a year-date is in the rare case when you can’t tell from context whether the date is before (e.g., a reference to David and Goliath), or after (e.g., a reference to the atom bomb), the birth date of Jesus, which this society has agreed to adopt as a reference point in time. The reason for the alternatives “CE” and “BCE” is so that people who are not Christians (who by the way happen to be most of the people now living) are not forced to acknowledge that Jesus is their God by using “AD” (standing for “Anno Domini” which Latin means “in the year of Our Lord”), or “BC” (meaning “Before Christ”, where “Christ” means “the Messiah”). Granted, it’s not as bad as being forced to wear a yellow Star of David like the Nazis forced many of my European ancestors to wear before murdering them, or having concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms (and yes, I actually knew a Jewish concentration camp survivor with that kind of tattoo), but there is a principal here.
So have I ever used “BC” when writing a date in ancient history? I probably have, just because it would have been “easy”. The point is that I get to have a choice here, because this is the United States of America. If you don’t like that, Xlrq, why don’t you go back where you came from, you non-American hater!