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

[Barbara Need]

At 19:35 -0500 01/3/05, Laurence Horn wrote:
>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.)

I was not aware of this distinction--and I lived north of Boston for 16 years!

>  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,

Somehow I wouldn't describe that as erosion--being far too sudden a
collapse. Of course, you are perfectly right, it collapsed as a
result of erosion.

>  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.

So would a Mayflower descendant born in Tennessee count as a Yankee
by this narrowest definition? (Mother born in New Jersey; mother's
father born in Massachusetts; his parents born in Maine.)

Barbara