He forgot to distinguish between numbers-using areas that use the article and those that don't. I say he stays in the minors for a bit more before he can come back here.
It is really so clear-cut, though? It seems that certain numbers lend themselves to articles, while others don't. For example, 101 is referred to as "the 101", correct? But I think 280 is just 280.
There's also "the" 1.
Anecdote of two hypothesis: we put an article in front of names of highways whose number-designation has a leading digit of 1.
someone else made the distinction further down in the thread, but I agree he's got to brush up. maybe he can just send you a picture of his cock and all will be forgiven.
Given what he thinks would be "interesting", I don't know if I want him back.
Nevermind about 2, apparently it's just those wacky Californians, because we also have "the" 5 that goes up the middle of California.
I put a "the" in front of all my numbered highways and freeways. The 280, the 1, the 101, the 5, the 405, the 85, the 55, what have you.
3: it's not so easy to get in my good graces.
2: Southern Californians, possibly because of smog-induced brain damage, refer to all numbered freeways as "the". Northern California, properly, do not. 'The' 101 is about the only highway that extends through both zones, but if you're being driven around the Bay Area by a So-Caler, he will tell you that you're on 'the' 280 as well.
8: This brings up another question: what makes a highway a "freeway"? Is it the same as an "expressway"?
Also, do you say the letter in front of the number? I'd probably say 'I-95' but '79.'
Entertaining in a different way is once again, dear old Pittsburgh. The Parkway East is 376. Now, 'Parkway West' seems to refer not to 376 going the other way, but to 279, which runs north and south and is also refered to as the 'Parkway North'. There is no 'Parkway South.'
Putting "the" in front of numbered freeways is a southern California trait and northern Californians like to get outraged about it. But why not? "The" Golden State freeway, "the" PCH, "the" El Camino Real Highway. Like every other instance of the southern California/northern California "rivalry", the northern Californians are outraged and frothing and the southern Californians are all "Dude, whatever. You got a nice little town up there. I liked the clam chowder in the sourdough bowl."
On preview: 8 - HAH!
9: A freeway is a highway with no cross traffic. In California there are signs notifying you of when a freeway becomes a highway and vice versa.
12: Nobody calls it The El Camino Real. That would be ridiculous.
'The' 101 is about the only highway that extends through both zones, but if you're being driven around the Bay Area by a So-Caler, he will tell you that you're on 'the' 280 as well.
The 1 and the 5 get no love?
I think in SoCal they call 1 the Coast Highway. As for the 5, nobody respectable goes anywhere near it.
"the" PCH, "the" El Camino Real Highway.
This is just ridiculous. The 1, but just plain PCH, and just plain El Camino.
Freeway = interstate. Highway = non-interstate: usually only two or four lanes, occasional stops as you pass through a developed area.
Northern Californians don't use the "the," but I'm starting to do it in anticipation of my move.
"I took the PCH to...", "I took PCH to..." Hmmm. Both sound fine. Nobody calls it the El Camino Real, but that is its real name. I was right about The Golden State, and respectable people take the 5 all the time, you coastist pig.
New hypothesis: SoCalers refer to highways in a different manner than the rest of the world because they are the one large population that has to take goddamn highways all the time just to get around.
10: I always called 376 the Parkway and tried to stay off 279.
579 (the crosstown expressway) is my favorite interstate. It's like fifty feet long. (Not the shortest, boo-hoo.)
IME people just say "El Camino". "The El Camino Real" isn't its real name, anyway; "El Camino Real" is.
I recently got directions from my dad that began "Take PCH to (place)", so I have testimony from The Folk on my side.
Plus, "the" El Camino would be totally redundant.
I have a friend who lived on Table Mesa Boulevard and it bothered him every time he saw it, for the several years he lived there.
Not all interstates are freeways. I will defend Unf's conception of 'interesting' to your dying breath.
I'm pretty sure this freeway discussion has been had before in the blogosphere several times. Possibly I have not seen it on this site however.
Freeway = interstate. Highway = non-interstate
21: Staying off of 279 is almost as smart as staying off of the Parkway especially if you have to drive on it during rush hour.
what makes a highway a "freeway"?
I was so disappointed to drive in CA for the first time and discover that the "freeways" were just expressways. "Freeway" just sounds so Sixties-utopian.
Metric signs seen in the US??? some kinda spotting club?
I'm trying to come up with a rule or preference for New York, and I'm thinking New Yorkers prefer roads to refer to geography--midtown tunnel, 59th Stree Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, BQE, LIE, Westside highway, &c. Then, alternatively, proper names.
Any other New Yorkers wonder, in adolescence, where in the Bronx the Minor Deegan was located?
27: I can't help it if the folks in NC don't speak English.
I grew up in LA, and my family had a split system for talking about numbered routes. If we were talking about local travel, we used "the": "I think I'll avoid the 405." If we were talking about long-distance travel, we didn't: "Let's take 101 instead of 5 up north."
No idea why.
33: Heh.
I am interested in the names vs numbers thing. Here in New England, any street or route that happens to have a number is referred to by its number, even if it has a name (no one ever refers to Rt 2 as Bald Hill Road) while in the Midwest it's the opposite (in St. Louis, no one ever refers to Lindbergh Blvd as Highway 67).
36: What about numbered county routes? Here in Essex County NJ I occasionally hear somebody referring to (say) South Orange Ave. as [whatever the fuck numbered county route it is] and think, "What the hell?"
34: I've always assumed that a freeway is any highway without tolls. Which, in NC, is all of them.
If I'm remembering my youth accurately, in California "freeway" means "interstate". I don't remember hearing the word since I left Modesto.
in California "freeway" means "interstate"
Okay, but in California, "washed-up hack actor" also means "governor," so I'm not ceding control of the language to you poor, confused fuckers.
OTOH, Californians don't have toll roads, which is obviously superior.
In Kansas City, Highway 9 is called "9 Highway." I've been told it's because the signs along it used to read Missouri at the top and Highway at the bottom, with a large 9 in the middle. I don't know if that's true, but the signs are different now, and the weirdness persists.
Wait a minute. I paid a toll getting from San Francisco to Sacramento just two weeks ago.
44: That doesn't make sense, you only pay the bridge toll when entering the city. Although I guess it's conceivable that the Bay Bridge has changed a lot in the last 2 years.. what a scary thought.
Yeah, I dunno either. It's been a long time.
"El Camino Real": as Kant said in the Spanish translation, a hundred real reals do not contain a centavo more than a hundred imaginary reals.
toll bridges > toll roads.
13 got it right the first time about the definition of freeway, as 25 illustrates.
I know what roads are called mostly from listening to traffic reports. Also places on the roads, like "Hubbard's Cave." Phrases like the latter feel invented for radio, though.
I don't remember what many roads were called in Columbus, whether because I've forgotten, never paid much attention, or because I've become aware of how eccentric my family's argot was, and therefore don't trust memory as being representative. "Route 23," pronounced rout and not root is one I do remember
OTOH, Californians don't have toll roads, which is obviously superior.
CA has plenty of toll roads. The 73, for instance, is a toll road.
37: I believe the same difference applies.
Expressway is one of the names, prevalent in some localities like Chicago, for the limited-access, divided-traffic, each direction at least two lanes wide roads we all know, and are likely to call Freeways in other places.
57 -- In Modesto, Briggsmore was designated an Expressway, where other thoroughfares were called Street or Road or Avenue. Briggsmore had fewer streets feeding into it you see, and a slightly higher speed limit than other city streets. 45 MPH if I recall correct.
44, 47 -There's a toll at the end of the Carquinez Bridge, on the 80 westbound towards Sac. I have paid it often. There are other bridges besides the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate (which both take an article, I notice), although since they don't lead to The City, you might never have taken them.
I think of those as toll bridges, not toll roads. Roads are god's gift to us for driving the savages out of the West and not something we should notice paying for. Bridges, well, those cost money.
Briggsmore anecdote: in 1986 our group of friends got into trouble with the law for drunkenly driving Mike Lo/pes' Ford Pinto along the bank of the canal which runs down the middle of Briggsmore Expy.
end of the Carquinez Bridge, on the 80 westbound towards Sac
The world has turned upside down, but the directions are the same.
Growing up on Chicago's Southside, I would hear WBBM's traffic reports and their references to the "Skyway." I envisioned some lofty, hyper-modern, Jetsons-esque thoroughfare, which was too cost-prohibitive for our lower-middle-class existence.
a hundred real reals do not contain a centavo more than a hundred imaginary reals
Which is why, whenever you needed a few thalers in Old Konigsburg, you just swung by Kant's place and said, "yo, Manny, lemme have 100 real thalers in exchange for 100 imaginary thalers." Worked every time.
I know what roads are called mostly from listening to traffic reports.
I always feel sorry for non-natives when I listen to traffic reports. How are they to know that the Blue Route is I-476? Everybody calls it the Blue Route in conversation, even on the radio. But if you're actually driving on it, the signs say 476. No "Blue Route" anywhere.
(I snicker at the traffic reporters who betray their non-nativeness by stumbling over the Welsh and Native American place-names. Conshohocken -- it's phonetic!)
And there are expressways in the Bay Area: Central, Lawrence, (I think) Foothill, probably many others. They all have traffic lights and intersections - they're just roads with higher speed limits.
67: I think the Hegenberger Expressway is what you take to get to the Oakland Colisseum to see the A's play.
67: That's right, expressways and freeways aren't the same after all, at least in California. (Though apparently those Santa Clara county expressways were intended to become freeways; the plan was scrapped in the '70s because of funding issues.)
This is the single least interesting thread in the history of Unfogged.
In Chicago, we would not call roads with those features expressways. At two places I can think of, a road becomes an expressway when it goes to limited access, no lights or other controls. Congress, in downtown, becomes the Eisenhower Expressway, formerly the Congress Expressway, when it leaves the lights and driveways behind. Similarly, US 41 becomes the Edens Expressway in the Northern Suburbs, approaching the city. In both cases, the expressways are also Interstates for all but a few hundred yards of their lengths, I-90 and I-94, respectively.
Oh, it's starting to come back to me: expressways were those streets that were designed to handle more traffic, and since they do actually have more traffic, are generally slower than 25 MPH neighborhood lanes. If I recall correctly, Telegraph Ave. is a designated expressway, at least south of Sacramento Ave, which is still hilarious.
70 -- it would not have to be very uninteresting to merit the title.
70 - Not for me. I LOVE infrastructure. I've noticed Unfogged doesn't talk about the physical world much. Is that 'cause you are all philosophers and you think deep thoughts about imaginary things, and sometimes people, and also communication, and not much at all about the tangible world?
If any of y'all want to branch out from roads into water or electricity, I am right here for you.
This is the single least interesting thread in the history of Unfogged.
Unfogged doesn't talk about the physical world
What about Labs' cock? That's what I call infrastructure.
Megan -- are you the blogger who works for CA government in some capacity that has to do with maintenance of the delta? If so I remember reading some interesting stuff on your blog in the past but had lost track.
This post might be about the physical world. The thread is not.
77 - It wasn't interesting. It's just about water and how it gets to where people drink it. You know, like how engineers intend for roads to do different things, and name them differently.
78 - Love mosquito abatement districts. But you're just humoring me.
Hey, thanks for linking to that thread, w/d, I had forgotten about Decibel.
75: That reminds me that my favorite comment thread, next to the "So Right, It's Wrong" thread, is this one.
70 is so, so wrong. Roads, motherfucker!
I had to look up a list of the names of stars to find that thread, because I knew its name included the name of a star, and that I'd recognize the name when I saw it, but I couldn't remember the name. Also, I saw The Illusionist and am curious about what your questions about its mechanics were. Shoot me an e-mail.
We had a thread that was mostly a suburbanization/urbanization discussion not too long ago.
We've also been going through a relationshippy-chatty phase lately: the substantive posting has largely been about gender relations. I keep on resolving to get less depressed about the news and post about it more, which may happen sometime.
Then there's the Heisenberg Expressway, where one doesn't know where one is until one gets out of the car.
I think the "the" is used in SoCal as a sign of respect. One must properly worship and occasionally pour libations to the Ghods of Asphalt, lest the freeways turn into parking lots on a permanent basis rather than merely during the 20 hours a day known as "rush hour".
In Boston, two main city routes were called "Comm Ave" and "Mass Ave" by locals, leading to confusion for visitors who drove down Commonwealth and Massachusetts Avenues looking vainly for the former.
Then there was my corner of th Berkshires, where we'd say "You take Rte 7 to Bucky's old place, then turn at the barn that burnt down on '57..."
We've also been going through a relationshippy-chatty phase lately
Maybe the blog is pregnant. Or on hormones before surgery.
We've also been going through a relationshippy-chatty phase lately: the substantive posting has largely been about gender relations.
Arguably the problem is that there's been a lot of substantive posting, whatever the topic.
Well, we saw what happened the last time someone posted a fluffy bit about a celebrity...
Assuming that there's a 'not' missing from 89, yup. I've been hurting a bit at work lately, which while it doesn't cut into my commenting nearly as much as it should, really interferes with any kind of meaningful posting.
Lubomyr Melnyk is a bit of a kook but his music rules.
24: Try living with The La Brea Tar Pits.
I just finished reading The Maltese Falcon and was surprised to find Spade scolding his secretary for "lousy construction" when she refers to a ship as "the La Paloma."
We've also been going through a relationshippy-chatty phase lately.
I take it personal.
Reading through those old comment threads makes me sad.
Check it out, it's my opera argument, which occurred first as farce and was repeated as tragedy.
Wasn't it subsequently repeated a few more times as light comedy?
OT, but as long as we're being sad: the division from Schofield Barracks that just deployed to Iraq is starting to have people killed, which leads to stories hitting the front page of our paper every few days that make me cry. The first was just 18 and newly married. Burn in hell, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
94: consider the proportion of substantive to non-substantive posts during this week.
I do not think that link means what you think it means.
I meant this link, but the link in 106 is to a comment that was made during the relevant week, so…
Hey, I think I didn't have sound capability at the time, so I never actually listened to the cowboy throat singing. As soon as the album I'm listening to finishes I am on that.