There's also the Royal St. John's Regatta [1], the oldest annual sporting event in North America. The day of the race is a holiday in St. John's (if weather permits boat races) so everyone in town knows about it.

(There's a Dingle Regatta in Ireland, there's a famous dance tune named after it but I've not been to Dingle and don't know what their regatta is actually like.)

Come to think of it, for all the talk of recognizing the word as a class thing, isn't it much more likely to be an "old coastal area" thing? You might need to be fairly rich to have a sailboat to race, but every place I've been around boat races it's been a huge party environment with very broad appeal and probably 100% local recognition. They're just not called regattas in Michigan...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_St._John%27s_Regatta

And until very recently, gay people weren't allowed to join the scouts.

I guess a non-affluent, prepubescent (cub scouts are 7-10 years old), gay boy might have missed that chance to learn the word "regatta".