Ben Guttmann
Years ago, I went for the first time to visit my grandmother in the bustling city of Great Falls, Montana. The New Yorker in me required that I used bustling sarcastically, though by Montana standards, it is – with roughly 60,000 residents, Great Falls is the third largest city (in the 44th largest state).
Getting to Montana required a flight to Great Falls International Airport, which, if my memory is correct, features a giant stuffed grizzly bear in the center of its lone corridor. Upon seeing the sign welcoming us to the facility, my father couldn’t help but mockingly throw up his arms and say, “Oh, it’s international! It’s a big deal!”
Again, we’re New Yorkers. We can’t help ourselves. But little did I know then, he was on to something about how we use language.
In the United States, there are over 100 international airports, and they range dramatically in size, from the relatively diminutive Great Falls International Airport and the actually-very-tiny Presque Isle International Airport in Maine, all the way up to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia, which lays claim to the title of world’s busiest passenger airport.
There’s a certain amount of prestige in being an international airport – while a few dozen can claim to be one, there are more than 5,000 airports in the United States that aren’t international. The ones that are will look to their cross-border nature as a badge of honor. They’re the big leagues.
As it turns out, that prestigious distinction matters a lot more to smaller airports than their larger cousins. In their descriptions of themselves, smaller international airports are much more likely to emphasize the international label than larger airports are.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania pulled a list of airports across the country and examined their websites. They were looking for self-references and categorized them into two buckets:
The results: smaller airports referred to themselves as “international” 68% of the time, and larger airports did the same only 31% of the time. The little guys used the big language more than twice as much.
In the same study, authors found that schools offering just a handful of graduate degrees were more likely to emphasize their “university” status than institutions that offered tons of them. And as a little poke at their fellow University of Pennsylvania students, they also looked at how often students described their school as an “ivy,” finding that Harvard students were significantly less likely to waive around the label than Penn students. Across all these experiments, the researchers say:
“In the social world, borders are also of special significance; one side of a border is generally more esteemed or valued than the other. We claim that entities (individuals, groups) that are just over the border on the positive side tend to exaggerate their membership on the positive side.”
In short, we use big words, fancy titles, and industry jargon when we’re afraid we won’t measure up. When we need the status, we call in the cavalry – but while these labels definitely say something about us, it might not be what we want.
