In the Southern United States, the term is sometimes used as a derisive term for Northerners, especially those who have migrated to the South. The more polite term is “Northerner”. In an old joke, a Southerner states, “I was 21 years old before I learned that ‘damn’ and ‘yankee’ were separate words.” 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.”[11] In Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary ‘Yankee’ is defined thusly: “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.)
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