[Talk-us] Name tag on unnamed, but numbered routes

[Zeke Farwell]

Very interesting.  I heard "The 1", "The 101", "The 5", etc all the time
when I was in school at UC Santa Cruz.  Didn't realize it was so specific
to southern California.  Must have been a lot of SoCal kids influencing the
campus culture.

On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 6:15 PM stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:

> This is from someone who has lived in and driven in both southern and
> northern California for decades (and double-majored in Applied Linguistics
> from the University of California).
>
> It's actually a linguistic curiosity of "Southern California English
> dialect" that people in and around Ventura, Los Angeles, San Bernardino,
> Riverside and Orange (sometimes San Diego) Counties — the very definition
> of "Southern California" — put the word "the" in front of a number
> representing a freeway / highway ("The 5" or "The 91," an Interstate number
> and a state route number, respectively).
>
> There is also a tendency (especially in radio traffic reports) to say a
> common "name" for a freeway / highway (like "Golden State Freeway" for I-5
> or "San Gabriel Freeway" for I-605) and these often get a "The" preceding
> them; BOTH of these tendencies (a prefixed "The" and "Name as often as
> number") are quintessentially SOUTHERN California "dialect."
>
> (SNL has great fun parodying this Southern California-ism on their sketch
> comedy "The Californians").
>
> To people from Northern California, BOTH putting "The" as a prefix AND
> using a freeway "name" instead of the number sounds odd (like "whad're you
> from LA or SoCal?!").  We DO have "freeway names" around here, like a
> segment of Highway 1 / Coastal Highway in Santa Cruz County is called
> "Cabrillo Highway" and ON RARE occasion, you'll hear someone say "take
> Cabrillo Highway South..." instead of "take Highway 1 South..."; this still
> sounds a bit weird to NorCal ears, though it isn't technically "wrong."
> And in Northern California you'd NEVER (well, virtually never) hear "take
> THE 1 South..." as that is whack and makes you sound like you're from
> SoCal.  Say "take 1 South" or if you MUST, say "take Highway 1 South."
>
> Additionally, there is a segment of "Cabrillo Highway" (Highway 1) in
> Santa Cruz County which is ALSO (?) named "A. Donald Hoover Memorial
> Freeway."  Since August 2013, the northbound lane of Highway 1 near Park
> Avenue and the southbound lane near the La Fonda Avenue Bridge (Santa Cruz)
> has this name (in OSM official_name=*) and we wouldn't want this to be in
> the name=* tag as then you'd get (as Minh once warned me about) your
> OSM-data-based satnav voice taking waaaaaaaay to long to say "A. Donald
> Hoover Memorial Freeway" instead of the much-shorter "Highway 1" (or even
> "Cabrillo Highway," though I wonder if the text-to-voice would correctly
> make the Spanish double-ell sound like a "y" as in "Cabri-yo" instead of
> "Cabrilo" — like a Brillo pad).
>
> We have name=*, official_name=*, short_name=*, loc_name=*...let's use
> these as they are documented, and eventually we'll get end-users (use
> cases, routers, sat-nav voices...) using them correctly.
>
> Eventually.
>
> In the meantime, please be aware there really are (minor, even among we
> who speak English) linguistic differences here across over a thousand
> kilometers from Mexico to Oregon.  California has about 40 million people
> and we are vastly diverse.  I'd say it's pretty safe to say similar things
> happen in other places in the USA, at least from region to region.
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