MrChips

Ive noticed that there are a few different brands in the US which incorporate the word "Yankee".

See "Yankee Daddy" on WT - or maybe the past branding of "Yankee Candle" or "New Yankee Workshop".

Is the word "Yankee" derived from the Civil war? I.e were the blues Yankees and the greys something else?

MrChips

Another thing - is the Stars and Stripes flag associated with Yankee - or if an american saw the flag with the word yankee - would it seem strange?

GatorB

They "greys" are you put it were the "rebels"

anyways

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...=define:yankee

MrChips

"The term Yankee has a variety of meanings. Generally, it refers to citizens of the United States, particularly those Americans from the U.S. Northeast. "

Gatorb

What term - apart from "americans" - could be used to group all americans together as one. Does such a term exist?

For instance, If I had a website called "newyankeeworkshop" - would americans from the southwest for instance feel asthough it did not apply to them?

See where Im coming from?

GatorB

Not that I am aware.

Most people would feel it's for people from New England.

MrChips

This explains the new york yankee football team name aswell then.

thanks for the info.

je_rome

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_260.html

The origins of "Yankee" have been fiercely debated throughout the history of the Republic, and to this day the Oxford English Dictionary says the source of the word is "unascertained." Perhaps the most widely accepted explanation was advanced by H.L. Mencken, the well-known newsman-scholar (and don't tell me that isn't an unusual combination), who argued that Yankee derives from the expression Jan Kaas, literally "John Cheese." This supposedly was a derogatory nickname bestowed on the Dutch by the Germans and the Flemish in the 1600s. (Wisconsin cheeseheads can undoubtedly relate.)

The English later applied the term to Dutch pirates, and later still Dutch settlers in New York applied it to English settlers in Connecticut, who were known for their piratical trading practices. During the French and Indian War the British general James Wolfe took to referring derisively to the native New Englanders in his army as Yankees, and the term was widely popularized during the Revolutionary War by the song "Yankee Doodle." By the war's end, of course, the colonists had perversely adopted the term as their own. Southerners used Yankee pejoratively to describe Northerners during the Civil War, but found themselves, along with all other Americans, called thus by the English during world wars I and II.

The alternative explanations--Mencken lists 16 of them--are that Yankee derives from various Indian languages, or from Scottish, Swedish, Persian, etc. James Fenimore Cooper claimed that Yankee resulted from a fractured attempt by the Indians to pronounce the word "English." But most others think Cooper was about as good an etymologist as he was a novelist.

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