Debra Yarnell, age 13, of Lowell, Mass., for her question:
HOW DID WE GET THE NAME 'YANKEE'?
People in other countries often call all of the people in the United States Yankees. In the southern part of the United States, the word Yankee means a Northerner, or someone who comes from north of the Mason Dixon line. But most people in the United States use the word Yankee to identify a New Englander.
No one is certain where the word Yankee came from. Some dictionaries say that the English word for Yankee comes from the Scottish word yankie. A yankie is a sharp and clever woman.
Other dictionaries say that Yankee is an Indian pronunciation of the word English, or of the French word for English, which is Anglais.
The word Yankee may have had a Dutch origin. Early Flemish people sometimes called persons from The Netherlands Jan Kees, which was short for the common Dutch names Jan and Cornelis. Some authorities say that the people of Flanders gave the same name to Netherlanders who lived in North America.
The first person to use the word Yankee very widely was a farmer of Cambridge, Mass., named Jonathan Hastings. He used the word in the early 1700s to express the idea of excellence, speaking of a "Yankee good horse," or "Yankee cider."
Harvard students who hired horses from Hastings started to use the expression.
The word was widely used during the Revolutionary War, when British soldiers made fun of New England troops by calling them Yankees. During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers called Federal troops "Yankees."
When United States troops arrived in Paris in 1917, the French press hailed them as Yankees or Yanks. Europeans have continued to use the word as a name for American soldiers.
People often say that someone is "shrewd as a Yankee" or "clever as a Yankee." The people of early New England had to develop great shrewdness and cleverness, living in the wilderness.
Salesmen from New England came to be known as "Yankee peddlers" as they roamed far and wide through early American communities, selling the articles made by Yankee craftsmen. These peddlers won a great reputation for getting high prices.
Yankee Doodle is a song that has been popular in America since Colonial days. The tune is an old one. It may have begun in southern Europe in the Middle Ages. About 1500 it was popular in Holland, where the harvesters sang it.
In Holland, all of the verses started with the meaningless words: "Yanker dudel doodle down." The song was also sung by small children in England during Shakespeare's time.
The words of "Yankee Doodle" known in the United States were written by an English army surgeon, Dr. Richard Schuckburgh. The song made fun of the untrained American troops during the French and Indian War in 1755. But the American troops liked the song and it soon became very popular.
The chorus goes: "Yankee Doodle keep it up, Yankee Doodle dandy, Mind the music and the step, And with the girls be handy