The South

Area in southeastern United States of America which has its own accent and culture which are frequently made fun of by Yankees. Composed of the former Confederate states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, plus depending on who you ask, possibly any of Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma.

IMHO, the South is the last bastion of the good life in America. While those Yanks are running around with their cities and their deadlines and all that snow, we Southerners are relaxing in our back yards, watching the grass grow and enjoying a lazy hammock day. In my experience as a transplanted Southerner, I've noticed a few things I don't like about the Northern lifestyle.

Yanks just don't know how to behave. Sad but true. Frat party here at Dartmouth? A bunch of people in sloppy T-shirts sitting around in a basement with a sticky, nasty concrete floor getting blasted. Frat party at Washington and Lee? Well-dressed people in a carpeted, clean house behaving like gentlemen. But it extends beyond just parties. Yanks don't know how to act like gentlemen! I would have been smacked silly when I was a kid if I forgot to hold a door open for a lady. Being polite goes a long way, you know.

Well, that's my take on the South. I love it. I want to get back there as soon as I can.

For me at least:

this is Ambivalence with a capital A.

The South is part of the southern third of the United States that wants to be part of the United States and also, doesn't.

It is a place where men are taught manners and wear suitcoats to dinner. Still.

I have often said you don't have to be dead to be important in the South, but it helps. This is both a compliment and a curse, and there's the rub

By living in the past, the South (folks there really do spell it this way, and I mean all the time) limits itself and also makes itself special and unique. At the same time. The term: walking contradiction may have been made famous by someone else, but it fits the South like a glove.

For those who feel this part of the United States has cornered the market on Racism, I refer you to Randy Newman and Good old boys, which is mostly about how the rest of the country doesn't get it about the South and doesn't want to own up to their own racism.

Southern Literature is its own self.

The South (or the Global South) is a collective term for all the poor countries of the world, since most developed countries exist in the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere. Poverty in this case is usually defined by the level of physical and human infrastructure development.

Alternative terms have included Least Developed Countries, Low-Income Countries, Developing Countries, the Majority World and the Third World, which dropped out of common vernacular following the victory of the First World over the Second in the early 1990s.

The term is somewhat loaded. It suggests that geographical location plays a deciding factor in a country's level of economic development, and this would help endorse the notion that the imperialist or neo-imperialist rich became rich by colonising and ripping off the poor (dependency theory). Spatial metaphors are often subjectively used to denote an unequal relationship between whoever is 'on top' and those who are at 'the bottom', so it is perhaps not suprising that the term originated in internationalist circles.

Aside from being inaccurate if you consider the location of wealthy Australia in the South or impoverished Mongolia in the North, it ignores important differences within each groups, such that several South countries have advanced to the stage that the majority of their citizens enjoy the living standards of the North.