I've been in rooms where someone's asked me "What year did you graduate Penn?" not because they were mistaken and thought I went there, but because the environment we were in was sufficiently high-class it didn't occur to them I might not have gone to an Ivy League school. It can get insane sometimes.
I had lots of experiences like yours up there. People noticeably changed their demeanor when they found out I was from Kentucky and Ohio, grew up on food stamps, and went to a medium sized Midwestern school. I once had someone actually ask me with a totally straight face "how do you know this stuff?" He was referring to machine learning and combinatorics. It was not meant as an offense. He was genuinely mystified that someone with my background could possibly know what a state space was.
I was once sitting in a restaurant in Boston for lunch. There was a basketball game on. I overheard two obviously upper crust fellows at the bar chatting about it: "I see they're playing a bit of street hoops... they must be in Chicago or Detroit."
"Detroit" was pronounced "dee-troit."
I'm a white nerd and right then I felt black as oil. Hilarious.
There's an amazing amount of brains and talent up there but it's all stuck in this morass of cultural anachronism. You could probably fix the place by kidnapping all incoming Harvard freshmen, dosing them with acid, and dropping them off at a hip hop show or Burning Man or something. It's too bad because Boston is a fantastic city and I otherwise liked it up there.
Unfortunately I fear that the insane gentrification in the Bay Area may eventually infect it with this stuff or at the very least drive out its culture of hands-on reality. You should thank the bums and the dirty hippies. They're a vital part of the ecosystem, a constant reminder that there is in fact a universe beyond planet trust fund.
The two I've heard are di-TROIT and DEE-troit. The emphasis is the most important, but "di" also typically doesn't have the long e sound (although it can).
Ha. Even worse, if you go out to eat on the east coast you often have to wear "nice clothes", they won't let you into the better restaurant unless you have a tie and jacket. What rubbish. :-)
I want to drive my Tesla up to the nice restaurant and get out in jeans. Up yours, fancy pants places.
