Yankees; was Re: FRIGIDAIRE and KLEENEX (was ICE BOX)

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:51 PM -0600 3/1/05, Barbara Need wrote:
>>Or that a
>>Yankee is anyone from the U.S., or more specifically someone from the
>>northern states, or more specifically someone from New England, or...?
>
>What is the or here (leaving aside the baseball team, which is, after
>all, not a subset of people from New England)?
>
No, the baseball team "Yankee" (or the defunct pro football team) is
a different item.  The more specific values of "Yankee" I had in mind
involve contexts in which, say, JFK didn't count as a Yankee because
he was Irish--"real" Yankees are WASPs.  ("Yankee" is standardly used
in the context of Boston and Massachusetts politics in this way.)  In
some contexts, that Greenwich, CT stockbroker who commutes to Wall
Street isn't really a Yankee.  But that craggy farmer from Vermont
who talks like the guy in the Pepperidge Fahm commercial and has a
profile like that of the (now eroded) Old Man of the Mountains, or
the Mayflower-descended non-rhotic headmistress of a New Hampshire
boarding school, and the laconic Maine lobsterman who mostly just
says "ayuh" are Yankees by any definition (except the baseball one,
and that we're agreeing is a different lexical item).  An argument,
perhaps, for a Roschian prototype definition, but I think it really
does involve true autohyponymy, with different cutoff points in
different contexts.

larry