1. A direction, usually seen pointing downward on a compass.
2. A fairly large region of the
United States. It consists of North Carolina,
South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and the southern half of Virginia. Sometimes Florida is considered part of the South. Kentucky and Missouri are NOT the South. Because of some Southern cultural and social connections, these two states are often considered Southern, but they are Midwestern states.
1. Okay, so to get from
Indianapolis to Louisville, you'll have to go south.
2. Missouri and Kentucky are not the South because they had large numbers of Irish and German immigrants, they didn't have strong institutions of slavery, and a lot of the people don't even sound Southern; they have neutral-sounding North or South Midland accents. Only the southernmost third of Kentucky and the southernmost parts of Missouri have truly "southern-sounding" people. Plus most of their economic ties are with their fellow Northern states around them, lots of people in Kentucky are descended from Pennsylvanians who came to Kentucky when it was
the frontier in the late 1700s, and the
overwhelming majority of both Kentuckians and Missourians fought for the North during the Civil War.