Yanks?

[hobbes]

Why do people call us "Yanks"?

What is a Yankee?

Sure we had the Confederate and the Yankee's in the Civil War, but that is over, I think.

Anybody know the origin and the nature (derogatory/neutral) of this word?

When someone says "those Yanks", I have to think about it for awhile until I realize he is talking about me (or us).

It sounds so very British, and very amusing to my eardrums.

[clocker]

After a quick and dirty google search it turns out that the term "yankee" originated in 15th century Holland. It is apparently a corruption of the Dutch word for "english". How it got applied to us I have no idea. I have never actually been called a "Yank" although I do see it upon occasion in posts from those unfortunate enough to live elsewhere. You know who I'm referring to...the Brits, the Germs, the Holls.
Pay them no mind, Hobbes.
They are insanely jealous because they do not have a Nebraska.

[hobbes]

I see from your avatar that your staring at Nebraska right now! Look at me, I waving to you from Lincoln.


:P

[amphoteric88]

do americans consider "Yank" a deragotary term?
i've never used it myself, but i've heard it being used
i never took it as being insulting, i thought it was just a nickname, like "Brits"

[Riddler]

or cheeseheads ? I can get away with that cuz..............I. AM. CANADIAN. eh. :D

[-Archwolf-]

I know what yankee means I'm from holland and along time we where the owners of New York (New-Amsterdam) and allot of Dutch immegrants went to live there and normal Dutch names are Jan (Yan) and Kees (Kees) and if you stick them together you have
jan-kees (Yankees) and that's olso a Dutch name and I gues it sticked around

[amphoteric88]

so it's not actually meant as a derogatory term then?
well, what can i say, free software, free music and free history lessons :D

[-Archwolf-]

nope it's just about the history of the Dutch in the States

[hobbes]

Originally posted by -Archwolf-@27 April 2003 - 13:56
I know what yankee means I'm from holland and along time we where the owners of New York (New-Amsterdam) and allot of Dutch immegrants went to live there and normal Dutch names are Jan (Yan) and Kees (Kees) and if you stick them together you have
jan-kees (Yankees) and that's olso a Dutch name and I gues it sticked around
Even if you made that up, I'm buying it.

Thanks for the explanation.

If you remember the toppling of Saddams stautue, you will recall that 2 protesting Iraqi men were carrying a large banner that read "Human Shields". Under this they had written, "Yanks(ees?), go home!"

Maybe Iraqis think that it is a derogatory term, or maybe they just overheard some journalists use the word and thought it was conveniently short.

Anyway, that was what triggered my initial post.

[clocker]

Hobbes-

Love the ongoing tale of your avatar and sig.
How did you escape from the crafty little Asian girl?

*bated breath*

[hobbes]

Originally posted by clocker@27 April 2003 - 17:57
Hobbes-

Love the ongoing tale of your avatar and sig.
How did you escape from the crafty little Asian girl?

*bated breath*
C'mon it's obvious. If you want to scare the Japanese, who do you call?

:o "God-zi-rah!!!!! Oh no, he crushing Tokyo!" :o

I just slipped out in the confusion.


I had been planning to sharpen a stick, heat it in the fire, poke her giant eye out with it, then escape the cage clinging to the underbelly of her sheep. It was only when I realized that she was not a cyclops and owned no sheep, that I scrapped that plan. Anyway, its been soooo done before.


Hmmm, perhaps an oblique plug for bookworld is contained above. No, not the Godzilla part, you knuckleheads.


("Kenny's poor because his father does't have a job, unless you count drinking Scotch a job", Eric CArtman
So going back to the other thread, I imagine she would be working for Kenny's dad.)

[TIDE-HSV]

I've never been referred to as a "Yankee" except when out of the states, being a native Southerner. OTOH, one great-grandfather fought for the Union and the other was a member of the Union League (the Confederates confiscated all his property), so I've never had any particular love for the Confederacy. Anyway, I never regarded it as a term of opprobrium, although the utterer might have thought it was. The "Jan Kees" story sounds better than anything I've ever heard. The Dutch pronunciation of English doesn't make any sense, since it's "Engels," and it's hard to twist that into "Yankees." "Spreekt U Engels?" "Spreekt U Deutz?" I can ask people if they speak English or German in a bunch of languages.

[TIDE-HSV]

A further thought on the "Yankee" term, I used to live in New York City, and when any native referred to anyone as a "Yankee," he meant someone from New England, probably Maine. That doesn't seem to quite fit.

[Rat Faced]

Word Origins (http://www.wordorigins.org/#search)

A Copy/Paste of my search on the above gives this:

Yankee
This self-referential American term is of uncertain origin. There are two leading hypotheses with several other less-likely contenders.
The OED2's earliest usage cites are from the 1680s. They refer to a pirate (at least it is probably to one individual) named Yankee Duch (1683), Captain Yankey (1684), and Captain John Williams (Yankee) (1687). The next earliest reference is an estate inventory from 1725 listing a slave named Yankee.

The earliest recorded usage of the term for Americans in general is in a 1758 letter by General James Wolfe, the hero of the battle of Quebec, in which he uses it as a pejorative term.

The song Yankee Doodle dates from 1775 and was intended to be insulting. Following the battle of Concord, during which the retreating British played it on the route back to Boston, the Americans adopted the tune as their own and the term began to acquire a complimentary sense.

This, however, may not be earliest usage of Yankee in a positive sense. In 1789, William Gordon published a history of the American Revolution in which he credits a Cambridge, Massachusetts farmer named John Hastings with using Yankee as an adjective meaning excellent as far back as 1713. John Hastings actually existed, but we have no other sources that credit his usage of the term, which is in contradiction to the general usage during the Colonial period.

The leading hypothesis as to its origin is that it is from the Dutch janke, meaning a diminutive of the name Jan. The OED2 favors this explanation, as does American Heritage and Ayto.

The second leading hypothesis is that it is from Jan Kaas, literally John Cheese, a nickname for the Dutch that parallels the British John Bull. Usage of Jan Kaas has been dated in Europe to the 1650s. The term could have been applied to Dutch pirates in the Caribbean (hence the 1680s references) and later shifted to New Englanders. Mencken favors this explanation, saying that the term was probably applied by Dutch New Yorkers to New Englanders "whose commercial enterprise outran their moral scruples." Thrifty New Englanders like Hastings may have taken this as a compliment.

Other, less likely origins have also been suggested.

The earliest suggestion comes from Thomas Anburey, a British officer serving under Burgoyne in 1789. He claims it comes from the Cherokee word eankke meaning coward. Supposedly, it was first applied by Virginians to New Englanders who refused to help them in their war with the Cherokees. No other reference to the Cherokee word has been found, however.
Others starting with the Rev. John Heckewelder (1819) and James Fenimore Cooper (1841), claim it derives from an American Indian corruption of the word English. Various supposed Indian words, such as Yengees, are claimed to support this hypothesis.
Washington Irving, in his Knickerbocker's History of New York, facetiously claims it comes from a MaisTchuseg (Massachusett) word Yanokies meaning silent men. Some have taken this to be a serious suggestion.
Another hoax appeared in an 1810 Boston newspaper. It claimed that it derived from a Persian word, jenghe, meaning warlike man or swift horse. The article was a parody of Noah Webster's writings and, again, some have taken it seriously.
The Pennsylvania Evening Post in 1775 suggested that it came from the name of an Indian tribe, the Yankoos, which meant invincible ones. Despite the patriotic sympathy exhibited by the paper, there is no other evidence of the existence of this tribe.
Various British dialectical words have also been suggested. Yankee was supposedly a Lincolnshire word for gaiters or leggings. In Scots, yankie means a forward, clever woman and yanking is an adjective meaning pushy, forward. Another dialect word, jank means excrement, although this one is pronounced with the /j/ sound, not the /y/.

[clocker]

Well, that should about cover it, Hobbes.

Take your pick.

Thanks RF.

[Rat Faced]

Your welcome.

Its one of those words that is either a term of endearment or an insult, depending upon the Context..

A bit like "Limey" & "Pom" for the English...

[hobbes]

Call me a nerd, but I bookmarked the link.

It is amazing how enriching it is to understand the context that surrounds the words and expressions we use everyday unconsiously. It sort of gives a third dimension to the written word.

I give the site a firm "crotch grab" in honor of RF.

[TIDE-HSV]

I give it the "loggorhea" award of the month! :lol: Seriously, I've been a life-long student of language. I enjoyed it.

[SuperJude™]

Well I am as Yank as they get, being from NY and all, so I never took the term to be derogatory.

I worked for some Brits when I lived in Seattle and they always called us Yanks and it was nothing more than a slang term for Americans. See there are 2 continents with the name "America" in it, so Yank refers to those of us from the US.

Personally I calll myself a Yank quite often when chatting with people from Europe, it's no different than Hoosier in my mind.

-SJ™

[hobbes]

Where I come from "Hoosier" is equivalent to "white trash" or "trailer park trash". A Hoosier is the guy who comes to fix your sink, and when he bends over gives you a grand tour of the crack of his formless pasty white ass. Only much later did I encounter the term associated with Indiana.

So I guess it all goes back to the context and the intent of the user.

[j2k4]

Very interesting!

Here's one:

The phrase "Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey"?

"Brass monkey" refers to the one-piece, berm-type perimeters on the decks of old fighting ships which served to "store" a pyramidal stack of cannonballs.
As these were forged of brass, their expansion/contraction rates differed substantially from that of the cannonballs; extremely cold weather thus resulted in "loose" ammo rolling about the decks. :blink:

[TIDE-HSV]

OK, then, what kind of ammo did the proberbial "witch's titty" contain? :lol:

[j2k4]

Originally posted by TIDE-HSV@28 April 2003 - 16:58
OK, then, what kind of ammo did the proberbial "witch's titty" contain? :lol:
Ice Milk? :huh: