12 Things People From Philadelphia Do That the Rest of Pennsylvania Can’t Stand

Ask someone from Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, or Lancaster what they think about Philadelphia, and you’ll get an answer that starts with some genuine appreciation and ends with a list.

Here are some things people from Philadelphia do that the rest of Pennsylvania can’t stand.

1. Treating Pittsburgh Like a Foreign Country

The Pennsylvania rivalry between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh is real and longstanding.

It also occasionally gets confused with a geographic misunderstanding where Philadelphia residents express genuine uncertainty about what lies between them and Pittsburgh.

Philadelphia is on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is on the western edge.

Between them is a large, populated, and interesting state.

Philadelphia sometimes talks about Pittsburgh as though crossing the Susquehanna River requires paperwork.

The people who live in the middle of the state observe this with the irritation of people who are being treated as scenery.

2. The Cheesesteak Argument That Never Ends

Philadelphia’s cheesesteak is genuinely delicious and deserves every bit of its national reputation.

What the rest of Pennsylvania finds exhausting is the frequency and intensity with which Philadelphians relitigate the cheesesteak in every food conversation.

They also correct people’s preparation methods and treat the sandwich as a test of cultural legitimacy.

The cheesesteak is great, but Pennsylvania has other food.

For example, Pittsburgh’s Primanti Brothers sandwich is a legitimate cultural icon that receives a fraction of the national attention and deserves considerably more.

3. Acting Like Pennsylvania History Is Specifically Philadelphia History

Pennsylvania has enormous historical significance, and much of it happened in Philadelphia.

Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and the Constitutional Convention, to name a few.

They’re real, important, and worth celebrating.

But Philadelphia sometimes extends this to a general claim on Pennsylvania history that the rest of the state doesn’t fully share.

The Pennsylvania Dutch Country has a history and a culture that predates the Revolution. Pittsburgh’s industrial history shaped American manufacturing. The Wyoming Valley has its own history that isn’t Philadelphia’s story.

Pennsylvania’s history is bigger than Philadelphia’s chapter of it.

4. Using “Jawn” Everywhere

Jawn is a Philadelphia-specific noun that can refer to any person, place, thing, or concept.

Philadelphians use it with a naturalness that reflects a lifetime of fluency in a word that doesn’t exist as a standard term anywhere else in the state or the country.

The rest of Pennsylvania hasn’t adopted “jawn” with the same universality. They sometimes receive it with genuine confusion.

Philadelphians who use “jawn” outside the city without providing context are conducting a linguistic experiment on an audience that didn’t sign up for it.

5. The Sports Fan Energy That Travels With Them

Philadelphia sports fans have a national reputation that the rest of Pennsylvania acknowledges with a combination of pride and concern.

When Philadelphia sports fans travel to other parts of the state for games involving Pennsylvania teams on opposing sides, the experience of hosting them is something that venues in Pittsburgh, Hershey, and other Pennsylvania cities have gotten quite good at managing.

The intensity is real.

The volume is real.

The willingness to have an extended conversation with strangers about the relative merits of their team is real… and not always invited.

6. Wawa Loyalty

Philadelphia’s relationship with Wawa is deep, genuine, and something the rest of Pennsylvania, which also has Wawa locations, finds over-the-top.

Wawa is great. Pennsylvania broadly agrees on this.

The difference is that Philadelphians treat Wawa loyalty as a point of regional distinction in a way that other Pennsylvania Wawa devotees find unfair.

It’s a convenience store. A very good one.

The rest of Pennsylvania loves it without organizing its identity around it.

7. Driving With Aggression

Pennsylvania driving varies by region, and Philadelphia’s regional contribution to that variation is a driving culture that the rest of the state experiences when Philadelphia drivers leave the city.

The merge that doesn’t wait. The horn as a first response rather than a last resort. The speed on the Schuylkill Expressway that treats posted limits as a minimum.

Pittsburgh’s driving has its own character, and Central Pennsylvania’s roads move at their own pace.

But Philadelphia’s style requires adjustment for everyone operating outside it.

8. Assuming the Eagles Are Pennsylvania’s Team

Pennsylvania has the Eagles, the Steelers, and a legacy of football loyalty that runs deep across both western and eastern parts of the state.

Philadelphians who assume that Eagles fandom is the default Pennsylvania football position are engaging in an optimism that the western half of the state declines to share.

The Steelers have six Super Bowl championships and fans in every county west of the Susquehanna who have never once considered switching allegiances, regardless of what the Eagles are doing.

Pennsylvania has two football cultures.

They coexist at arm’s length, and they don’t merge.

9. The Soft Pretzel Possessiveness

Philadelphia soft pretzels are excellent, and the city has a legitimate claim to a distinct pretzel culture that deserves recognition.

What the rest of Pennsylvania wants to remind them is that pretzels are also a Pennsylvania Dutch tradition. The Pennsylvania Dutch soft pretzels predate the Philadelphia version.

So, the snack doesn’t belong exclusively to Philadelphia, regardless of how the city discusses it.

The Amish country pretzel and the Philadelphia street pretzel are different products from different traditions that both deserve their place in the state’s food identity.

Philadelphia acknowledging this would go a long way with the folks in Lancaster County.

10. Treating Central Pennsylvania as a Drive-Through State

Philadelphians driving to Pittsburgh, to the mountains, or to the western part of the state pass through Central Pennsylvania with an urgency that treats everything between the I-76 on-ramp and the Pittsburgh exit as a transition rather than a destination.

Central Pennsylvania has Hershey, the Amish Country, State College and Penn State football, Gettysburg, and a landscape that people from other states specifically travel to see.

It’s not a drive-through.

It’s the middle of a genuinely interesting state that would appreciate being noticed by the people passing through it.

11. The Accent Pride That Comes With Commentary

The Philadelphia accent is one of the most distinctive in the country, and Philadelphians are aware of this in a way that produces commentary.

References to the accent, demonstrations of the accent, explanations of specific Philadelphia pronunciations to people who didn’t ask for them.

The rest of Pennsylvania has its own regional speech patterns, including Pittsburgh’s yinzer dialect that’s equally distinctive and considerably less discussed by the people who have it.

Philadelphia’s linguistic self-awareness is a feature of the culture.

The volume at which it gets shared is the part that occasionally lands wrong.

12. Claiming Rocky as a Philadelphia Citizen

Rocky Balboa is a fictional character from a 1976 movie.

Philadelphia’s relationship with him is something else entirely.

The statue, the steps, and the genuine emotional investment in a character who exists only on film.

The rest of Pennsylvania observes this with the understanding of people who recognize that regional pride takes many forms, and some of those forms involve a bronze statue of a movie character at the top of museum steps.