Yankee or Dixie?…
Y’all might head to over to “The Yankee or Dixie Quiz” to answer twenty quick questions (based on the 30788 responses to the Harvard Computer Society Dialect Survey) that will neatly locate one’s locution as “Yankee” or “Dixie.”
The caution at the top of the questionnaire notwithstanding, half the fun is poking each possible answer to see its regional root.
As we sharpen our sybilants, we might bring in a birthday cupcake for Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, born on this date in 1804. Related by marriage to both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann, Peabody was an active member of the Transcendentalist circle, counting among her associates, Thoreau, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller…. she outlived them all, and kept the Transcendentalist flame alight (among other ways, by editing The Dial); but her most lasting contribution may well be the kindergarten: an active educational reformer, she opened the first (English-language) kindergarten in the U.S, in 1860.
