Yankee

The term Yankee (sometimes shortened to "Yank"), has a few related meanings, usually referring to someone either of general United States origin or, more specifically within the U.S., to people originating in New England, where application of the term is largely restricted to descendants of the English settlers of the region.[1]

The meaning of "Yankee" has varied over time. Originally in the 18th century it referred to residents of New England of colonial English descent, which was later used by Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). As early as the 1770s, the British used the term for any person from the U.S. In the 19th century, southern U.S. people used the term to refer to those from the northern U.S. who were not recent immigrants from Europe; thus a visitor to Richmond, Virginia, in 1818 commented, "The enterprising people are mostly strangers; Scotch, Irish, and especially New England men, or Yankees, as they are called."[2]

Outside the country, "Yankee" or "Yank" is a slang term for anyone from the United States. It is especially popular with the British.

Contents

Origins and history of the word

Loyalist newspaper cartoon from Boston 1776 ridicules "Yankie Doodles" militia who have encircled the city

Early usage

The origins of the term are uncertain, although there are many speculative suggestions. In 1758 British General James Wolfe made the earliest recorded use of the word Yankee to refer to people from the U.S., referring to the New England soldiers under his command as Yankees: "I can afford you two companies of Yankees, and the more because they are better for ranging and scouting than either work or vigilance."[3] Later the term as used by the British was often derogatory, as shown by the cartoon from 1775 ridiculing Yankee soldiers.[3] The "Yankee and Pennamite" war was a series of clashes that occurred in 1769 over land titles in Pennsylvania, in which "Yankee" meant the Connecticut claimant.

There have been many false theories on the origin of the term, including one by a British officer in 1789 who said it derived from the Cherokee word eankke, meaning coward, but there is no such word in the Cherokee language.[4] Native American origin theories are not well received by linguists. One theory suggests the word is a borrowing from the Wyandot (called Huron by the French) pronunciation of the French l'anglais (meaning the English), sounded as "Y'an-gee".[4][5] Writing in 1819, the Rev. John Heckewelder stated his belief that the name grew out of the attempts by Native Americans to pronounce the word English.[4] The U.S. novelist James Fenimore Cooper supported this view in his 1841 book The Deerslayer. Linguists, however, do not support any Indian origins.[4]

Dutch origins

New Netherland is to the northwest, New England is to the northeast

Most linguists look to Dutch sources, noting there was a great deal of interaction between the Dutch in New Netherland (New York) and the Yankees of New England. The Dutch first names "Jan" and "Kees" were and still are common. In many instances both names (Jan-Kees) are used as a single first name. The word "Yankee" is a variation that would refer to English settlers moving into previously Dutch areas.[4]

Michael Quinion and Patrick Hanks argue[6] that the term refers to the Dutch nickname and surname Janneke (from "Jan" and the diminutive "-eke", meaning "Little John" or Johnny in Dutch), Anglicized to Yankee (the "J" is pronounced "Y" in Dutch) and "used as a nickname for a Dutch-speaking American in colonial times". By extension, the term grew to include non-Dutch colonists as well.

H. L. Mencken[7] explained the derogatory term "John Cheese" was often used against the early Dutch who were famous for their cheese. An example would be a British soldier commenting on a Dutch man "Here comes a John Cheese". The Dutch translation of John Cheese is "Jan Kaas" where the J sounds like Y. The two words sounded like "Yahnkees", and the term was born.

Yankee Doodle

Perhaps the most pervasive influence on the use of the term throughout the years has been the song Yankee Doodle, which was popular at the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), since following the Battle of Concord, it was broadly adopted by Americans and today is the state song of Connecticut.

Canadian usage

An early use of the term outside the United States was in the creation of Sam Slick, the "Yankee Clockmaker", in a column in a newspaper in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1835. The character was a plain-talking American who served to poke fun at Nova Scotian customs of that era, while trying to urge the old-fashioned Canadians to be as clever and hard-working as the Yankees.

Damned Yankee

The "damned Yankee" usage dates from 1812.[3] During and after the American Civil War (1861–1865) Confederates popularized it as a derogatory term for their Northern enemies. In an old joke, a Southerner alleges, "I was twenty-one years old before I learned that 'damn' and 'yankee' were separate words."

Yankee cultural history

The term "Yankee" now may mean any resident of New England or of any of the Northeastern United States. The Yankees diffused widely across the northern United States, leaving their imprint in New York, the upper Midwest, and places as far away as Seattle, San Francisco and Honolulu.[8] Yankees typically lived in villages (rather than separate farms), which fostered local democracy in town meetings; stimulated mutual oversight of moral behavior and emphasized civic virtue. From New England seaports such as Boston, Salem, Providence and New London, the Yankees built an international trade, stretching to China by 1800. Much of the merchant profits were reinvested in the textile and machine tools industries.[9]

In religion, New England Yankees originally followed the Puritan tradition, as expressed in Congregational churches; beginning in the late colonial period, however, many became Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, or, later, Unitarians. Straight-laced 17th century moralism as described by novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne faded in the 18th century. The First Great Awakening (under Jonathan Edwards and others) in the mid-18th century and the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century (under Charles Grandison Finney, among others) emphasized personal piety, revivals, and devotion to civic duty. Theologically, Arminianism replaced the original Calvinism. Horace Bushnell introduced the idea of Christian nurture, through which children would be brought to religion without revivals.

After 1800, Yankees (along with some Quakers and others) spearheaded most reform movements, including those for abolition of slavery, temperance in use of alcohol, increase in women's political rights, and improvement in women's education. Emma Willard and Mary Lyon pioneered in the higher education of women, while Yankees comprised most of the reformers who went South during Reconstruction in the late 1860s to educate the Freedmen.[10]

Politically, Yankees, who dominated New England, much of upstate New York, and much of the upper Midwest, were the strongest supporters of the new Republican party in the 1860s. This was especially true for the Congregationalists and Presbyterians among them and (after 1860), the Methodists. A study of 65 predominantly Yankee counties showed that they voted only 40% for the Whigs in 1848 and 1852, but became 61–65% Republican in presidential elections of 1856 through 1864.[11]

Ivy League universities and "Little Ivy" liberal arts colleges, particularly Harvard and Yale, remained bastions of old Yankee culture until well after World War II.

President Calvin Coolidge was a striking example of the Yankee stereotype. Coolidge moved from rural Vermont to urban Massachusetts and was educated at elite Amherst College. Yet his flint-faced unprepossessing ways and terse rural speech proved politically attractive: "That Yankee twang will be worth a hundred thousand votes", explained one Republican leader.[12] Coolidge's laconic ways and dry humor was characteristic of stereotypical rural "Yankee humor" at the turn of the 20th century.[13]

The fictional character Thurston Howell, III, of Gilligan's Island, a graduate of Harvard, typifies the old Yankee elite in a comical way.

By the opening of the 21st century, systematic Yankee ways had permeated the entire society through education. Although many observers from the 1880s onward predicted that Yankee politicians would be no match for new generations of ethnic politicians, the presence of Yankees at the top tier of modern American politics was typified by Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, and by Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean (as well, to some observers, by 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Forbes Kerry, descendant through his mother, of the Scottish Forbes family, which emigrated to Massachusetts the 1750s). President Barack Obama is of Yankee descent on his mother's side; his high school was Punahou School, founded to serve the children of Yankee missionaries to Hawaii.[14]

Contemporary uses

In the United States

Within the United States, the term Yankee can have many different contextually and geographically-dependent meanings.

Traditionally, Yankee was most often used to refer to a New Englander descended from the original settlers of the region (thus often suggesting Puritanism and thrifty values).[15] By the mid 20th century, some speakers applied the word to any American born north of the Mason–Dixon Line, though usually with a specific focus still on New England. However, within New England itself, the term still refers more specifically to old-stock New Englanders of English descent. The term "WASP", in use since the 1960s, refers to all Protestants of English ancestry, including both Yankees and Southerners, though its meaning is often extended to refer to any Protestant white American.

The term "Swamp Yankee" is sometimes used in rural Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, and southeastern Massachusetts to refer to Protestant farmers of moderate means and their descendants (in contrast to richer or urban Yankees); "swamp Yankee" is often regarded as a derogatory term.[16] Scholars note that the famous Yankee "twang" survives mainly in the hill towns of interior New England, though it is disappearing even there.[17] The most characteristic Yankee food was pie; Yankee author Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novel Oldtown Folks celebrated the social traditions surrounding the Yankee pie.

In the southern United States, the term is sometimes used in derisive reference to any Northerner, especially one who has migrated to the South; a more polite term is "Northerner". Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas pointed out as late as 1966, "The very word 'Yankee' still wakens in Southern minds historical memories of defeat and humiliation, of the burning of Atlanta and Sherman's march to the sea, or of an ancestral farmhouse burned by Cantrill's raiders."[18] In Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary 'Yankee' is defined in this manner:

"n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See DAMNYANK.)"

A humorous aphorism attributed to E. B. White summarizes these distinctions:

To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.
To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.
To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.
To Easterners, 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.

Another variant of the aphorism replaces the last line with: "To a Vermonter, a Yankee is somebody who still uses an outhouse." There are several other folk and humorous etymologies for the term.

One of Mark Twain's novels, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court popularized the word as a nickname for residents of Connecticut.

It is also the official team nickname of a Major League Baseball franchise, the New York Yankees.

A film about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was titled The Magnificent Yankee.

A play on that title became the title of a book about the ball club's dynasty: The Magnificent Yankees.

In other English-speaking countries

In English-speaking countries outside the United States, especially in Britain, Australia, Canada[19], Ireland[20], and New Zealand, Yankee, almost universally shortened to Yank, is used as a derogatory, playful or colloquial term for Americans.

In certain Commonwealth countries, especially Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, "Yank" has been in common use since at least World War II, when hundreds of thousands of Americans were stationed in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Depending on the country, "Yankee" may be considered mildly derogatory.[21]

In Australia the word Seppo, derived from septic tank, is used as rhyming slang for Yank.[22]. It s generally intended as a mild insult said in jest, rather than the serious insult its origins could suggest.

In other parts of the world

In some parts of the world, particularly in Latin American countries, Spain and in East Asia, yankee or yanqui (phonetic Spanish spelling of the same word) is sometimes associated with anti-Americanism and used in expressions such as "Yankee go home" or "we struggle against the yanqui, enemy of mankind" (words from the Sandinista anthem). In Spain and many countries of Latin America the term refers to someone who is from the U.S. In Venezuelan Spanish there is the word pitiyanqui, derived ca. 1940 around the oil industry from petty yankee or petit yanqui[23], a derogatory term for those who profess an exaggerated and often ridiculous admiration for anything from the United States.

In the late 19th century, the Japanese were called "the Yankees of the East" in praise of their industriousness and drive to modernization.[24] In Japan since the late 1970s, the term Yankī has been used to refer to a type of delinquent youth.[25]

In Finland, the word jenkki (yank) is sometimes used to refer to any U.S. citizen, and with the same group of people Jenkkilä (Yankeeland) refers to the United States itself. It isn't considered offensive or anti-U.S., but rather a spoken language expression.[26] However, more commonly a U.S. citizen is called amerikkalainen (american) and the country itself 'Amerikka'.

The variation, "Yankee Air Pirate" was used during the Vietnam War in North Vietnamese propaganda to refer to the United States Air Force.

In Iceland, the word kani is used for Yankee or Yank in the mildly derogatory sense. When referring to residents of the United States, norðurríkjamaður or more commonly bandaríkjamaður, is used.

In Polish, the word jankes can refer to any U.S. citizen, has little pejorative connotation if at all, and its use is somewhat obscure (it is mainly used to translate the English word yankee in a not strictly formal context, e.g. in a movie about the American Civil War).

In Sweden the word is translated to jänkare. The word is not itself a negative expression, though it can of course be used as such depending on context.

Joshua Slocum, in his 1899 book Sailing Alone Around the World refers to Nova Scotians as being the only or true Yankees. It thus may be implied, as he himself was a Nova Scotian, that he had pride in his ancestry. "Yankee" in this instance, instead of connoting a form of derision, is therefore a form of praise; perhaps relevant to the hardy seagoing people of the East Coast at that time.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Ruth Schell, "Swamp Yankee", American Speech, vol. 38, No.2 (1963), pp. 121–123. accessed through JSTOR
  2. ↑ See Mathews, (1951) pp 1896-98 and Oxford English Dictionary, quoting M. Birkbeck
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Mathews (1951) p 1896
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 The Merriam-Webster new book of word histories (1991) pp. 516-517.
  5. ↑ Mathews (1951) p. 1896.
  6. ↑ Review of Quinion, Michael Port Out, Starboard Home
  7. ↑ Yankee from Words@Random
  8. ↑ Mathews (1909), Holbrook (1950)
  9. ↑ Knights (1991)
  10. ↑ Taylor (1979)
  11. ↑ Kleppner p 55
  12. ↑ William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge (1938) p. 122.
  13. ↑ Arthur George Crandall, New England Joke Lore: The Tonic of Yankee Humor, (F.A. Davis Company, 1922).
  14. ↑ Smith (1956)
  15. ↑ Bushman, (1967)
  16. ↑ Ruth Schell, "Swamp Yankee", American Speech, vol. 38, No.2 (1963), pp. 121–123. accessed through JSTOR
  17. ↑ Fisher, Albion's Seed p 62; Edward Eggleston, The Transit of Civilization from England to the U.S. in the Seventeenth Century. (1901) p. 110; Fleser (1962)
  18. ↑ Fulbright's statement of March 7, 1966, quoted in Randall Bennett Woods, "Dixie's Dove: J. William Fulbright, The Vietnam War and the American South," The Journal of Southern History, vol. 60, no. 3 (Aug., 1994), p. 548.
  19. ↑ J. L. Granatstein, Yankee Go Home: Canadians and Anti-Americanism (1997)
  20. ↑ Mary Pat Kelly, Home Away from Home: The Yanks in Ireland (1995)
  21. ↑ John F. Turner and Edward F. Hale, eds. Yanks Are Coming: GIs in Britain in WWII (1983), primary documents; ; Eli Daniel Potts, Yanks Down Under, 1941-1945: The American Impact on Australia (1986); Harry Bioletti, The Yanks are coming: The American invasion of New Zealand, 1942-1944 (1989)
  22. ↑ http://www.australiatravelsearch.com.au/trc/slang.html
  23. ↑ A Little Insult Is All the Rage in Venezuela: ‘Pitiyanqui’, The New York Times.
  24. ↑ William Eleroy Curtis, The Yankees of the East, Sketches of Modern Japan. (New York: 1896).
  25. ↑ Daijirin dictionary, Yahoo! Dictionary
  26. ↑ . See comments on H-South by Seppo K J Tamminen at

Further reading

Linguistic

External links