I love how McGill calls the Carolina tartan "patronizingly named"... what gives? MacWage, you and I are both Carolinians... do you feel patronized by the name of the tartan? I sure don't!

In his description of the North Carolina tartan, he calls the Carolina tartan "mysteriously named and mysteriously provenanced." Uh.... okay Jose. Whatever.

In a personal letter her wrote to me a while ago, he expressed the fact that he doesn't think the Carolina tartan is a good tartan. He thinks it is a poor design, he thinks the legislation formally adopting it as the state tartan (in both states) was poor, and he thinks most of all that it makes no sense for two different states to share a single tartan.

On this last point, perhaps being in Edinburgh and not from the Carolinas he has no idea how close the bonds of these two states are, and how many North Carolinians feel just as at home in SC as in NC, and vice versa.

Different states share symbols all the time. For instance, both NC and VA have the cardinal as their state bird. Also, the same tartan is often used by more than one group. Reference our recent threads here on the Black Watch tartan, which is also Campbell, Hunting Munro, Hunting Grant, Sutherland district, et al.

McGill simply does not know what he is talking about.

(For those of you who don't know the background, the Carolina tartan was designed by Peter MacDonald, tartan expert from Perth, Scotland, in 1981 at the request of St. Andrews societies in both NC and SC. In 1991 NC adopted formal legislation approving it as a state symbol. In 2002, SC formally adopted it through legislation in that state. McGill designed his "North Carolina" and "South Carolina" tartans in 2003 and neither have any official standing with the states for which they are named.)