303WX ePortfolio 3

Upon google searching the term “hillbilly” I pondered for a second the reflect on my personal definition of what I thought a hillbilly was.  Now, being born and raised in Las Vegas I have had my exposure to people that I thought the vast majority of the general population to consider a hillbilly.  As I entered my rat year at VMI almost 3 years ago, I quickly realized that there was more to how people identified themselves with where they were from than just silly common redneck, hillbilly, hillrod type terms that didn’t clear define what constituted as what.  So in my own opinion I came to the conclusion that a hillbilly to me is someone who is unsophisticated and loves to live on country rural land and fully embodies the “southern” American culture.  Now, a redneck on the other hand, is all of those things a hillbilly embodies, but with a little extra southern, and a lot of times what is considered western culture added to the mix.  I meet a lot of people that live in and around the Vegas Valley that if you met them you would instantly think Texas.  But there is a breed of people that I have had the chance to familiarize myself with that are rednecks to the “T” but have no ties to are any background that they can trace back to the south or to Appalachia.  Now googling hillbilly brought up the definition relatively close to how I outlined the term above.  I came across pictures of rougher looking people smoking pipes in overalls working on farms, and everything really played along with the sterotypical description of a “hillbilly”.  Upon google searching the term “redneck” I was surprised at how immediately a lot of the exact same images were popping up, however; the definition read, “a working-class white person, especially a politically reactionary one from a rural area” (Google, 1).  This definition was vastly different than the given definition of a hillbilly.  The only similarity I could draw other than the obvious, was the short mentioning of them being located in a rural area.  This to me seemed like societies gentle way of bridging the gap between the two closely related terms.  I almost felt like however was in charge of the google definitions page was at a loss on how to provide a proper and appropriate definition, that was descriptive without being offensive.  It makes me wonder about how those kind of conversations that were had in the professional corporate setting where political correctness and proper language and diction are stressed to the absolute fullest.  I really wonder how the people in charge of what is displayed for google definitions came to the conclusion to link certain search results to two different words.