For about a year during college, I worked for the State Archives in Tallahassee. I can’t remember meeting a single person in the State Department that had a Southern accent.

A lot of the disappearance of the “Old South” has to do with telecommunications, too, and the growth of America’s retail chains. The spread first of nationally programmed television, followed by broadband, and the darkly hegemonic rise of every globally recognized brand from Wal-Mart to McDonald’s has had the effect, I believe, of eroding the most distinguishing of many communities’ pre-20th century cultural characteristics, especially accents. David Riesman has a lot more to say about all this in The Lonely Crowd. Anyway, by now the South has lost much of its uniqueness as a region, and I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide if this is a positive or a negative thing. For me it’s a complicated loss, even though admittedly most of it happened before I entered the world.

So it’s not like I didn’t hear Southern accents growing up, but they were in the minority; half of the kids I knew who lived way out in the country still spoke like—seemingly accentless—TV characters. The strange result is that, based on my experience, the Office characters who work at Dunder Mifflin in Scranton, Penn., remind me a lot more of people I knew in Tallahassee than the character who is supposed to be from Tallahassee. We are all Northeasterners now.