You know how you can tell that we don’t truly think of Thanksgiving as being about thankfulness anymore? Which syllable most of us put the accent on. Most people say thanks-GIVING. But think about it — you don’t say horse-RACING; you say HORSE-racing. BABY-sitting, not baby-SITTING.

So why not THANKS-giving? Some people say it that way, especially when the word is used as an adjective: many say THANKS-giving turkey, but still call the day they serve it on thanks-GIVING.

The accent has changed as our concept of the holiday has. THANKS-giving would convey that we were giving thanks. When we say thanks-GIVING we are just uttering a string of sounds only vaguely connected to what the words thanks and giving mean. It’s rather like ice cream: we don’t really conceive of the stuff as “iced cream;” in our heads it’s more like a single word “eyescream.”

Consider also Thanksgiving food. Every decade the turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, and the like become more archaic in terms of how Americans actually eat day to day. This line-up of dishes obviously does not correspond to anything about giving thanks. Nor, for that matter, does it correspond meaningfully to what the Pilgrims themselves actually ate on the first Thanksgiving.

It is, really, the kind of food that was considered the hallmark of a bounteous American table in the 19th century, which has gone out of style as we have become wary of cholesterol, careful about sugar, and steered to a focus on chicken as the fowl of choice that has largely marginalized turkey to processed lunchmeat except in November. Our suddenly eating like characters in an Edith Wharton novel once a year is, then, gestural, as unconnected to the purported substance of the holiday as the way we pronounce its name.

On Thanksgiving, while maybe a few holdouts make sure to muster up a sense of thanks for the season’s harvest or a mental salute to the Pilgrims who originated the holiday, it’s safe to say that for most of us what Thanksgiving is about is eating a large, starchy meal while taking advantage of the occasion to see family and friends.

At an early Thanksgiving dinner I just attended, conversational topics ranged from the consumption of horse in Japan, plot turns in the narrative of the movie “Booty Call,” and the fact that if you record someone saying the word oil and play it backwards, it sounds precisely like the word oil (it’s nifty indeed — it has to do with the fact that we pronounce the l in oil more like the “aw” sound that the o in oil stands for than is intuitive to us). Thankful, however, we were not, except to the host and hostess.

Yet I nevertheless value Thanksgiving as more than just a reason to gather around a meal. That, after all, sums up the Fourth of July and, in practice, Christmas and Easter as well. Thanksgiving is peculiar in that the menu is so set, and so distinct from the way most Americans under a certain increasingly advanced age eat regularly. Thanksgiving dinner is a distinctly specific aspect of being American.

This really hits you if you’re overseas on Thanksgiving, and notice how peculiar you sound telling people that on this particular Thursday of this particular month, you are wishing you could have turkey and only that bird even though it’s rarely all that good, with cranberries congealed and chilled into a kind of jelly to be mixed with it, potatoes whipped into a mush, a pie made from pumpkin meat mixed with nutmeg, and so on. You almost feel like someone getting nostalgic for dried grasshoppers or antelope brains.

Suddenly, in such situations you realize that Thanksgiving is part of being an American. And in a vividly felt way, in contrast to more abstract ways of being American, such as individualism and an embrace of the American Dream. Thanksgiving is glutinously concrete. It is also a way of being American that needs no ambivalence or shame. Unlike Hollywood, hot dogs, hamburgers, and hiphop, no one can accuse Thanksgiving of leaping its bounds and threatening other cultures’ cuisines: Thanksgiving stays right here.

Or, a year ago I gave some linguistics talks in Europe. Inevitably the Iraq War came up. When I ventured — gently, I might add — that I had been in favor of it at the outset, this was considered so utterly repulsive by my two host professors that one of them barely ever spoke to me again. Being American among those who aren’t can be a tricky business these days socially.

Well, Thanksgiving — peculiar, arbitrary, long-lived, and unexportable — is one part of being American that we can all be more comfortable with. I’m looking forward to the second of what will be three Thanksgiving dinners for me this year. Next week I’ll get back to everyday American food like sushi, pappardelle, and lamb vindaloo.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.