Ask a Southerner where the South begins and you might get answers like "where one-syllable words become two or three" or "where the most honored food are grits and gravy." By those measures, the South should theoretically begin in Richmond, Virginia, or Lexington, Kentucky, or even Wheeling, West Virginia. But the Mason-Dixon Line, which has been regarded for 200 years as the boundary line between the North and South in the United States, turns that conventional sociological thinking upside down.