Re: Harvard

John McCarthy (jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU)
06 Jan 1995 04:29:50 GMT

Ivy League was originally the nickname given to an American football
league of schools that played each other. The Ivy League colleges are Brown,
Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and
Yale. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation is 1933.

Needless to say, the name is used in various extended senses, mostly
for applying reverse snobbery as in

1951
J. D. Salinger Catcher in Rye xvii. 133 The jerk had one of those very phoney,
Ivy League voices, one of those very tired, snobby voices.

-- 
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.