Y’all Qaeda may be the newest sarcastic term for the Oregon militiamen, but embedded in the critique of militiamen as terrorists akin to Al Qaeda and ISIS (another favored term being Vanilla ISIS) is a regional slam. The use of “y’all” in the term is a signifier that these are country folk, with all the negative stereotypes that follow the category. And I’ll bet my daughter’s current college fund (don’t get excited, there’s like 3 dollars in there) that the term will spread well beyond the current militia-tastrophe. As a current resident of New England, I can tell you that the image behind the term is precisely how many northerners perceive almost all of the rest of the United States, from the South to the mountainous West: insincerely polite, “Y’all” and “ma’am” talking, racist, fascist, … [Read more...]
Your accent is we-ahd
I grew up a Navy brat, bouncing from coast to coast in the U.S. until the 11th grade, when I hunkered down in the South for more than a decade. Although I had visited family in New England, and my grandmother retained her New Hampshire accent through five decades of living in North Carolina, when I moved north after grad school I was unprepared for the radically unique accent, temperament, and driving style that is Boston. After I made the transition north in 2007, the learning curve was steep. Driving successfully required a transition from extreme patience, a trait required in North Carolina (where drivers will stop at a green light for 30 seconds to allow another driver to enter the road), to extreme efficiency in the Boston area (where drivers feel it is a moral imperative to honk … [Read more...]
