Harvard of the South (HotS); Harvard on the Hocking; Harvard on the Highway...

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun Mar 4 23:54:22 UTC 2007


At 5:48 PM -0500 3/4/07, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On 3/4/07, Susan Burt <smburt at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>>
>>I spent a year at McGill and had no idea it was called the
>>"Harvard-on-the-St.Lawrence."
>
>New Jersey City University (known to locals by its old name, Jersey
>City State) is affectionately nicknamed "Harvard on the Boulevard"
>(i.e., Kennedy Boulevard).
>
>>On the other hand, once I spotted someone in a University of Chicago
>>sweatshirt that was emblazoned with:
>>
>>"Harvard, the University of Chicago of the East."
>
>I believe Stanford uses the same line.
>
When I left the University of Wisconsin for Yale, I was given a
T-shirt at my going away party that read "Yale, the Wisconsin of the
East."  This type always struck me as rather less effective for
institutions like the University of Chicago or the University of
Wisconsin--it works better for Stanford or even, say, Carleton or
Reed, since it takes a while to process that the reference is to the
college and not the state or the city.

LH

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