If you’re like me – Southern born and (corn)bred – there really is no debate: That most delectable Thanksgiving dish is called “dressing.” Full stop. Over and out. Don’t let the screen door hit you.

But some people in other parts of the country call that same dish “stuffing.” So which should you use? Let’s discuss.

The difference, historically, was in how the dish was cooked. “Stuffing” means the dish made from hard bread, chopped celery and seasonings is “stuffed” inside the turkey and cooked, where the bird’s juices add liquid. “Dressing” is a side dish, cooked with added broth and served separately to accompany the bird. But that’s changed: Most health experts say it is no longer considered safe to cook the dish inside a turkey that starts out raw due to a risk of cross contamination and foodborne illnesses. That means stuffing is technically obsolete, but the word is still very much in use.

Ingredients-wise, they are the same dish – the only difference is that Southerners frequently substitute cornbread for the bread base. Still, many people use the words interchangeably whether it is inside the bird or out.

The word “dressing,” according to Dictionary.com, comes from the verb “to dress,” which has been used since the 1300s to mean “to prepare a food for cooking, often especially a bird (or other meat). It can also mean to season a dish,” leading to the term “salad dressing.”

People in the Victorian era thought “stuffing” was a potentially stomach-turning word, and therefore tacky, according to the Dictionary.com article. “In the 1800s, the word ‘dressing’ gained popularity in some areas of the U.S. as a word for the dish cooked inside a bird,” the article said. “The rise of this preference is theorized to be based in part on Victorian-era prudishness and a resulting movement away from more ‘graphic’ terms for food preparation. The idea is that the word ‘stuffing’ may not be so appetizing when you really think about it.”

Michelle Darrisaw wrote in an article for Food and Wine that the word was considered offensive.

“Our predecessors of peace, prosperity, and refined sensibilities apparently couldn’t stand behind such an offensively crude word as ‘stuffing,’“ she wrote. “Either way, it seems the South embraced the Victorians’ standards, while the North couldn’t be swayed.”

In 2017, Butterball – the turkey folks –released the results of a study on usage of the words. As you’d expect, use of “dressing” is more common in the South. But surprisingly, the study showed only eight Southern states use the word “dressing” more than “stuffing.” In Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky, “dressing” is preferred 62 percent to 38 percent. In Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma, “dressing” is preferred 52 percent to 47 percent (the other percent is unaccounted for. Perhaps they say tur-dress-stuff or something).

In all other regions, “stuffing” beats the stuffing out of “dressing.” I could throw the entire discussion into a turkey-tailspin by mentioning some people in Pennsylvania call it “filling.” We’ll save that debate for later because … where would I even start?

Even Martha Stewart weighed in on the topic: “For me and much of the country stuffing is stuffing simply because of geography. Most northern states call the side stuffing regardless of preparation, while those south of the Mason-Dixon line call it dressing.”

For those still confused, I have a simple way to determine whether to use “dressing” or “stuffing:” If it comes from a box marked Stove Top, it’s “stuffing.” If it’s handmade by MeeMaw, it’s dressing. Either way, I’m going back for seconds.