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

[Brian Stromberg]

Funnily enough, I had the exact same experience at the same school, only I
was a local that was confounded by the transplants =)

—
Brian

On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 7:46 PM Zeke Farwell <ezekielf at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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-- 
--
Brian
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