"The South always begins ten miles south of wherever you happen to be standing."

[muckefuck]

If you have a moment, why not join febrile's poll of what cultural regions certain US states belong to? (And I say this because I'm genuinely curious to see what the results of a larger sample would be, not just because I'm trying to rectify any specific imbalances in responses. After all, I'm sure several of you reading this are ignora independently-minded enough to place Missouri in "the South" as well.) As grahamwest's participation testifies, American citizenship is not necessary!

At the risk of prejudicing the results, I've always found attempts to draw borders between cultural regions following state lines to be somewhat silly. After all, political borders, unlike cultural boundaries, are absolute, arbitrary, and fixed. For that matter, any attempt to set up categories based on a single "sufficient and necessary criterion" is bound to fail, as I've tried to explain before in this journal. Not only do the data resist it, but our own heads don't even work that way.

Edit: In fact, whether to spite me or what, the votes of those I redirected have decreased the number of respondents who consider Missouri "Midwestern" from fourth-fifths to two-thirds. Way to go, East Coast freaks!

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Or Inner and Outer Midwest?

Actually, I tend to think of the Great Lakes as a region with common characteristics (as long as one is comfortable splitting states like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in half or more).