I grew up in an incredibly upscale town in Massachusetts. My parents moved a couple of years ago to another upscale town, but one that doesn’t yet have the cachet of the one I actually went to high school in. I still tell people I am from the original town (and I am, I mean, I was in graduate school when they moved so they may have moved but I still have the high school degree link).
People often act reasonably impressed when they ask me where I went to school for my degrees and I tell them (just started working so they’re still asking) but I no longer bring that up by myself…it actually makes me uncomfortable because now that I’m in the working world I realise that there are people who are a million times more competent than I am who didn’t go to name-brand schools for one reason or another.
The town I grew up in was big and lightly populated, with vineyards and farms and chickens in people’s backyards and horses and deer and pheasant. If you mentioned the name, people were not impressed because there wasn’t even a store that sold socks in town.
Now it is densely populated, with million-dollar houses everywhere (and that’s a big price when the average 4 bedroom is still about $150,000) and you’re tripping over professional sports players at the grocery store. We are home to one of the newest trendy, upscale “lifestyle” centers in the region, and not only can you buy socks here now, you can buy everything, and there are still farm stands everywhere. Now when I say where I live, people are impressed. Then I feel compelled to say I live in the old part, so that no one thinks I’m a snob. Which is my form of snobbery towards those Johnny-come-latelys who never smelled the intoxicating scent of the vineyards during football games.
Oh, and our library was just voted #1 in the country. So I’m a library snob, too.