But southern culture isn’t all cowboy hats and big belt buckles, it’s more to do with manners and food and the like is one way to put it, though not that simple either. All the Texans I have spoken to (from different parts of Texas) refer to themselves as southerners.
Yeah, well, there’s people in Maryland who think they live in the South too. Texas doesn’t have much in common with the Deep South - I suppose it’s most correct to say it’s a whole nother country.
Tell that to them folks in El Paso.
Not so. What you may mean is “The feedlots stink.”
I agree, nobody should come to the Midwest. It’s one big red flyover place, nowhere to land.
Sounds like bannerrefugee is feeling nostalgic for the big city. Sounds like he could use a nice song about driving in town …
*What I like about you, you drive just right
Yelling like an asshole, flip me the bird tonight.
You’re honking in my ear,
Travelling a half foot from my rear,
'cause that’s true
That’s what I like about you
What I like about you, you really know how to drive
When you’re uptown, downtown, you don’t take no jive!
You’re honking in my ear,
Travelling a half foot from my rear,
'cause that’s true
That’s what I like about you
That’s what I like about you
That’s what I like about you …*
Now then, doesn’t that want to make you move right on back to New York City? 
What I have come to realize, as a small(ish) town midwesterner – particularly from the past two elections – is that the people who complain most about the midwest are most often the people we would like the least to live here anyhow.
I think he meant he was expecting Texas culture to be all big hats and belt buckles (it’s not, FWIW), not Southern culture.
And no true Texan would refer to themselves as a “Southerner”, they is Texans Says Duke, who was once described by an English gent (who happened to live in Houston) as an “unintelligible redneck”.
A guy’s job transfers him to a new town. His first day there he goes to a local bar. He asks the bartender, “Hey, what are people like around here?” The bartender says, “I don’t know, what were they like back home?” “They were all assholes,” says the guy. “Well,” said the bartender, “They’re probably all assholes here, too.”
Actually, I meant that I thought of Texas as Western and was surprised to find that Houston, at least, is Southern. El Paso, I imagine, would be another matter entirely. I find it hard to imagine someone who lives within sniffing distance of New Mexico self-identifying as a Southerner.
Well, that too of course. Went without saying. But I had more than one say “I’m southern, and in the South we do it this way.” to describe cultural differences.
Yep, East Texas is what I’d call closest to “Southern” in Texas. “Urban Cowboy” was filmed at Gilley’s in Pasadena (Houston area), so lots of people imagine Houston to be like that I guess.
My step dad is from Houston and he certainly would call himself a Texan even though he has lived in SC for like 30 years.
I consider Texas to be the southwest. It’s more like New Mexico and Arizona than it is like Louisiana or Alabama.
Yes, Texas (in my brain) is Western, along with New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and everything to the west of those save Idaho, Washington and Oregon, which are The Northwest. But California isn’t Western. California is…California.
Tennessee is, oddly enough, also Western. I believe it’s connected through one of them space-time wormhole thingies.
Texas is Texas. The South is next door.
I grew up in a tourist town. A lot of the tourist would come down to Myrtle Beach and lecture us on how they did things in NJ. It was very annoying.
See? This is what I thought before I moved here. Turns out, this part of TX is a lot like Louisiana - especially since 2005, when apparently 1/3 of New Orleans’s population showed up on out doorstep.
I thought Texas would be dry, dusty and cowboy. Houston is hot, humid and Cajun. It’s the birthplace of zydeco, for hell’s sake.
I thought the OP was talking about South Dakota until he mentioned the atomic bomb thing.
I’ve lived in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami by way of big cities; I’d go back to small town South Dakota in a heartbeat if my ex would only vaporize.
It wasn’t that they were expecting me to adopt their ways of doing things, more we were comparing notes is all. Not a big deal really, and I think we each came away with alternate ways of doing things “just for giggles”.
How can the southernmost state in the union (aside from maybe a tiny portion of Florida) bordering Mexico not be South?
Because “South” isn’t about geography, but about culture. How can the southern end of Indiana, a state which touches the Northern border of the country, be South? 'Cause it is, that’s how.