False Modesty

People from the West are not as familiar with this phenomenon as people from the East, so I am surprised Scott Adams knew it, but maybe he runs into a lot of Harvard people at Comicons. Or ran into them, back when you could still hold a convention. In any case, I have been entertaining people for years with a version of this, quoting someone saying "I went to school in Cambridge," and suggesting they took the mandatory class, false modesty 101, since the only people who say "I went to school in Cambridge" are Harvard graduates. It especially tickles MIT people, since MIT is also in Cambridge, Mass. We have a saying at MIT; "Hell is Up The River," which refers to Harvard's inferior position along the Charles River.

Astoundingly, when I looked for it on Google just now, "Hell is up the river" wasn't there. In a few days, it will be.

There is an MIT version: "I went to a little technical school in Cambridge." Ironically, in 1904, 12 years before MIT moved to Cambridge from Boston, there was consideration of it becoming Harvard's school of engineering. Since I neither went to a prep school, nor had a father and grandfather who went to Harvard, I'm lucky that didn't work out.

Comments

[Linda Lawless]

Paul, my father went to Harvard. He was a SD farm boy who said he didn't want to stare at the back end of horse for the rest of his life so got a scholarship and went to Harvard B School. Trust me, there was NO false modesty and until he passed he refused to eat anything green that grew in a field plowed by a horse.

[Robert E. Malchman]

You never have to worry about false modesty with MIT -- it gets dumped on you. "MIT? Oh Michigan Tech!"

"MIT? Where's that?" Massachusetts. "Oh, I didn't know that."

Or my favorite, said to a woman who lived in my dorm when she told a shopkeeper in her hometown she was going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Oh, you're such a smart girl. I thought you'd go to the University of Florida or Florida State, not have to go to a trade school."

Mmm-hmm.