11 Things Massachusettsans Do That Would Horrify the Rest of America

Massachusetts is the state that essentially invented America, has never fully gotten over it, and brings it up more than is strictly necessary. The Bay State was here first — in terms of colonial settlement, revolutionary activity, elite educational institutions, and the general conviction that the correct way to do most things was figured out somewhere between Cambridge and Beacon Hill and the rest of the country has been catching up ever since. Massachusetts is brilliant, infuriating, deeply provincial about a place that considers itself cosmopolitan, and possessed of a sports culture so intense it has required therapy in other cities. Grab a Dunkin’, merge onto the Pike, and try not to use a turn signal.

1. Drive with an aggression so complete and so consistent it has its own name

The Massholes — a term Bay Staters use about themselves with something between shame and pride — are legendary American drivers. The turn signal is not used because signaling intent gives other drivers information they could use against you. The merge is executed by simply moving into the space and letting consequence sort itself out. The horn is a primary communication tool used for emphasis, disapproval, and general announcement of presence. Boston’s roads, many of which follow 17th-century cow paths, reward aggression and punish hesitation, and three centuries of this environment have produced drivers who are genuinely, consistently, magnificently terrible and completely at peace with it.

2. Refer to every sub sandwich as a “grinder” and every shopping cart as a “carriage”

Massachusetts has its own vocabulary that it uses without apology or translation. A sub is a grinder. A shopping cart is a carriage. A water fountain is a bubbler. A traffic rotary is not a roundabout. Sneakers are tennis shoes or just sneakers but definitely not “kicks.” These are not regional quirks to a Massachusettsan — they are simply the correct words for things, and the existence of other words for the same things is not something Massachusetts has chosen to engage with.

3. Take an almost aggressive pride in being the home of Harvard and MIT while pretending not to

Massachusetts contains Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Tufts, Northeastern, Wellesley, Amherst, and approximately forty other institutions of higher education per square mile, and the accumulated intellectual self-regard of this concentration permeates the culture in ways that are simultaneously impressive and exhausting. Nobody from Massachusetts says outright “we are smarter than you.” They don’t need to. It comes through in the conversation, in the casual citation, in the way a point is made and then made again with a footnote, and in the patient tone used when explaining something for the second time.

4. Spend the entire winter complaining about the cold and the entire summer complaining about the tourists

Massachusetts winter is genuine — gray, icy, bitter, long — and Massachusettsans complain about it with a sustained creativity that suggests they experience it fresh each year despite having lived through it forty times. Then summer arrives, the Cape fills with tourists from New York and Connecticut and New Jersey, and the complaining pivots seamlessly to the traffic on Route 6, the lines at the Wellfleet Oyster Festival, the difficulty of getting a table anywhere in Provincetown, and the general invasion of a place that is, it must be said, extremely worth visiting. Both complaints are sincere. Neither leads to any action.

5. Eat a Fenway Frank at Fenway Park and believe genuinely that it tastes better there

Fenway Park — opened in 1912, the oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball, with a left field wall called the Green Monster that is both a design flaw and a beloved landmark — is treated by Red Sox fans with the reverence usually reserved for cathedrals. The Fenway Frank, a simple steamed hot dog that would be completely unremarkable anywhere else, tastes different inside Fenway. Massachusettsans will tell you this and they are not wrong — the context is the ingredient, and no hot dog in a modern stadium with cup holders and a wifi signal has ever tasted like a hot dog eaten at Fenway Park in the seventh inning on a June night when the Monster is throwing a shadow across the infield.

6. Treat the Big Dig with a complicated mix of resentment and pride that defies easy summary

The Big Dig — Boston’s $22 billion highway project that rerouted Interstate 93 underground through the city, took sixteen years, ran massively over budget, involved a fatal ceiling collapse, and also genuinely transformed downtown Boston — is discussed by Massachusettsans with the ambivalent pride of people who survived something enormous and emerged into a better city that they’re not entirely willing to admit is better because of the process it took to get there. It was a disaster. It worked. Massachusetts holds both of these things simultaneously and with some difficulty.

7. Vacation exclusively on Cape Cod and defend this practice against all alternatives

The Cape — that distinctive flexed arm of land extending into the Atlantic from Sandwich to Provincetown — is the Massachusetts vacation destination of choice for a significant portion of the population, and it is chosen year after year with the loyalty of people who have decided that the right beach, the right clam shack, the right town, has been found and the search is over. Suggestions of other vacation destinations are received politely and not acted upon. The same cottage has been rented by the same family the same week in August for thirty years. This is not rut. This is tradition.

8. Say “wicked” as an intensifier without any awareness that this is regional

“Wicked good.” “Wicked cold.” “Wicked smart.” “That’s wicked far.” Wicked is the Massachusetts intensifier, deployed across every adjective without self-consciousness or restraint, and Massachusettsans use it in other parts of the country and seem genuinely surprised when it marks them as from somewhere specific. It is not slang to them. It is grammar. The word “very” exists and is available but requires more syllables and conveys less commitment.

9. Follow Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins with a simultaneity that leaves no emotional bandwidth for anything else

Boston is one of the few American cities where all four major professional sports teams are consistently competitive, which means Massachusetts sports fans carry an ongoing, overlapping, four-front emotional investment that has left some of them genuinely depleted. The 2004 Red Sox World Series win — breaking the 86-year Curse of the Bambino — produced an emotional release in Massachusetts so large and so long-deferred that grown adults cried in public without embarrassment and were comforted by strangers who were also crying. This is not an exaggeration. The sports are not separate from the identity. They are the identity.

10. Refer to the rest of New England with a proprietary affection that the rest of New England finds presumptuous

Massachusetts is the largest and most populous New England state, contains its dominant city, and has a tendency to speak for the region in ways that Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island find presumptuous to varying degrees. “New England seafood” means Massachusetts seafood. “New England fall foliage” is photographed in Massachusetts. “New England values” are Massachusetts values with a wider attribution. The other states are aware of this. Massachusetts remains unaware that this is a thing it does.

11. Spend extraordinary amounts of money to live in small spaces near Boston and describe it as worth it

Boston real estate operates at a price point that would cause cardiac events in most of the country — small apartments in Beacon Hill, South End, and Cambridge rent for prices that could purchase actual houses in most American cities, and Massachusettsans pay them, renew their leases, and rationalize the decision with the practiced calm of people who have been doing this calculation for years and have made peace with the outcome. The walkability is worth it. The history is worth it. The proximity to everything is worth it. The T — unreliable, beloved, perpetually underfunded — is probably not worth it, but it’s part of the deal.

Massachusetts is the state that started the country, built the universities, threw the tea in the harbor, and has been absolutely certain it knows best ever since — and the maddening thing, the thing that’s hardest to argue with, is that it’s often right. The fall foliage is genuinely extraordinary. The seafood is genuinely world-class. The history is genuinely everywhere — you can stand on a corner in Boston where something that mattered happened, where someone made a decision that changed what the country would become, and feel the weight of that in a way that no amount of reading fully prepares you for. Massachusetts is provincial about a place that has earned its provincialism, intellectual about things worth being intellectual about, and loyal to a fault to a sports culture that has rewarded that loyalty with championships. It’s a lot. It is also, undeniably, something.