IN A previous post my colleague tackled the question of what it means to be from the South in America. I don't know if other regions agonise about this the way the South does, but "Who's Southern?" is a vexed question even for people with pretty solid Southern credentials. Take me, for example. My dad's side of the family is from Georgia, while my mom is an army brat from Milwaukee. I was born in Tennessee, spent two years there, three in Arkansas, three in Nebraska and then ten in Georgia before going to college in New Orleans. My Southern credentials are almost perfect, right?

Yet in graduate school in Britain I met a friend with similar credentials—born in North Carolina, graduated from the University of Georgia and a sorority girl to boot—who insisted that neither she nor I was really Southern. We argued about it for years. If we were not Southern—born, raised and educated there, with only one parent each not from there—then the "Southerner" must be a rare kind of purebred. But we were internationalist and progressive, and we had chosen to leave, so we couldn't be Southerners, she replied. Southerners were parochial, had Southern accents, drank sweet tea for breakfast, got married 15 minutes after college graduation and named their kids Hunter and Caitlin. (She didn't mean rednecks, but the kind of educated types she was in a sorority with.) We went back and forth, finally burying the hatchet when I said, "OK, we're ethnically Southern", kind of like a non-practising Jew. She conceded to this weird compromise and we left it at that.

It is interesting that in response to Alexandra Pelosi's condescending video (see above), some have made arguments similar to my own—that you can be gay, lefty and Obama-loving and it doesn't make you any less Mississippian. But I know Southerners, Mississippians, who would disagree, who would take the proud version of the same position that my friend took, that to be a true Southerner, you have to love God and guns and football and sweet tea. This view dovetails with, but isn't co-extensive with, the Palinesque view that there are parts of America, and Americans, that are only technically American. They're not "real America". A subset of this belief exists in the South—you have to be X, Y and Z to be a real Southerner. To be just born and raised there makes you only technically a Southerner. (They'd never say it to me, but I know my family in Macon thinks I'm less Southern than they are. Not because I live in New York, but because I grew up in fancy Atlanta, speak Portuguese, and wrote a book.)

And so in a funny way, Ms Pelosi and the Southern rah-rah crowd are allies: they both want the South to be an essence, not a messy mix of gays and straights, Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, atheists and Christians, readers and football fans. Which brings me back to my colleague's observation that in recent reports Newt Gingrich has been excommunicated from the South. Mr Gingrich doesn't have a Southern accent, isn't notably pious, has a PhD, reads French, and probably handles a shotgun about as well as I do, which is to say competently but clumsily. For a lot of people, this makes him less Southern, despite some 40 years of residency in Georgia. But what are we to call him, then? A non-practising Southerner, perhaps.