The American South
... serve “mama’s home cooking.” The farther one travels north the less likely they will be to find a restaurant serving traditional foods cooked in the home. Then there’s the tea, which will forever produce a staple in the South where iced tea is claimed to flow like water. When asked to define the South most people never fail to mention Southern eating customs. In an article about the South, CNN Correspondent, Linda Ciampa said, for example, “So, if you crave creamy grits, sweet onions, iced tea, or hickory smoked barbecue, come hungry to the South. You won't be disappointed, and you'll likely go home whistling Dixie.” “There are mint juleps on the verandah, Georgia pecans with South Carolina blue cheese, plenty of soft shell crabs deep fried over an open fire and tastes of buttermilk biscuits and Virginia ham,” a southern inhabitant stated of the south. For such reasons it is clear that food is a primary and frequently used variable in defining the South. Southerners have forever been scorned by Bostonians, New Yorkers, New Englanders and other Yankees for our distinct dialect. We have been viewed as ignorant and backward because of our “Northernly” claimed incomprehensible accents. Evidence has shown various accounts of individuals moving north from the south or vice versa who receive endless mockery during the following years of their arrival because of their differing pronunciations and word uses. In one story, for example, a young girl, after moving from California to Texas, answered her teacher with a polite “Yeah” versus the traditional Southern “Yes, ma’am”, and consequently was scolded before the class. It didn’t take long for her to learn that in the south children are expected to respond to teachers and other adults with yes or no ma'am or sir. It is okay and most common she found to run the words together making them "Yesum" and "Noum" or "Yessir" and "Nossir," yet never acceptable to reply with a simple “Yeah.” Such instances are very frequent because of the large amount of differing word uses that together make “Southern” and “Northern English” dissimilar. Other prime examples include using fixin' to for preparing and y'all for a group of people. The differing regional accents, though, are primarily what set the languages apart. Yankees, for example, say cawfee for coffee, dis for this, howzat? for how's that?, and ax for ask. Southerners, on the other hand, generally say things as aint for aunt, nekkid for naked, git for get, and Jew? for Did you?. Accents have and continue to be an issue of great debate in both the north and south. Northerners commonly regard those with Southern accents as slow and courteous yet hardly intelligent or well-educated while Southerners often mock Northern accents claiming they sound cold, rude and abrupt. Inhabitants of the south are known for the high standards they hold on northerner’s ability to change their accents and word uses when they move south. I believe this so because the “Southern acce...