<p>10mwil:
couldn’t disagree with you more; the students I knew at Davidson did not define themselves as ‘preps’ nor did they attempt to look any particular way. What they were: students who had attended private prep schools, whose WASP families had lived in the south for many generations-sons of generations of bankers(Charlotte is a major banking city), lawyers, physicians etc…who are simply the southern cousins of their ‘northeast’ counterparts that you seem to venerate. To somehow say that wearing old topsiders from East Hampton and attending Deerfield and Harvard is prep and wearing docksiders from your Hilton Head summer home, attending Saint Mark’s Episcopal school in Dallas and going to Vanderbilt is not-well, I agree with most of the other posters-I am not sure I see your distinction-other then if you are not from the northeast-today, it isn’t real. Just because a family got off of the Mayflower in Massachusetts, doesn’t mean they stayed in that area forever. My ancestors did not like the snow… :)</p>