Two more things

[dira]

One, a sheepish observation I meant to include yesterday: since writing a story in which Ray Person removes his gloves by biting the fingertips, I have become 100% more likely to remove my gloves by biting the fingertips. /o\


Two, a question for Californians: if a person did not happen to know the local name of the highway she was on, because of reasons, but did know that it was (California) State Road 3, what would she call it? Not the 3, presumably. California 3? State Road 3? 3? This situation would never arise because non-numerical names are printed on all the highway signs?

Comments

[james]

State Highway 3 - there are almost never non-numerical name signs anywhere on the road itself (that I've seen). But everyone would understand State Highway 3, no matter what else it was called.

ETA: If you are in a town and talking to locals and 3 runs near or through town and thus everyone knows it, you would probably just call it 3. "I'm gonna take 3 to the lake."

More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[sara]

It'd mostly depend on whether they were in northern or southern California. In northern California, you'd say you were "On 3," but in southern California you'd say you were "On the 3."

So, for example, one may "drive on the 405," but one would "take 580 east."

Non-numerical highway names are relatively unusual, except in the case of historical roads, e.g. the Pasadena Freeway (which is what everyone calls 110) or Redwood Highway (part of the 101...which I should not call "the 101" through Sonoma, but I spent most of my childhood in southern California and it runs the length of the West Coast!) or places like that.

I am not even making this up. This is totally one of the regional linguistic differences between northern and southern California.

There are also state standards around what numbers are used and in what order -- this looks to me like a good reference.

[cofax7]

Route 3, probably.

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[waketosleep]

I am fascinated by this, because I have lived in several parts of Canada but we put 'the' in front of highway names and numbers almost across the board. I only say 'almost' as a hedge because I'm not sitting here trying to think of counter-examples. Maybe if we say 'Highway XYZ' instead of 'the XYZ'. Oh, dialect areas.

/linguist

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[james]

I did not know this! I can confirm I am in northern California. :-) (Also, in other parts of the country, we would say '3' like in Oregon and Oklahoma. So clearly it's the southern Californians who are weirdos...)

[arduinna]

... Doesn't everyone pull their gloves off with their teeth? I'm usually juggling a purse and a laptop bag and a water bottle and there's no way I can free up both hands at the same time just to remove a glove.

I pull mine on that way, too, half the time. *tries to figure out how this works to describe it*

I had to pick something up in my other hand to make sense of this. wtf, self. Anyway, what I do is, whatever hand is free takes the glove out of my pocket (or picks it up from a table, but usually it's in a pocket) and I stick my hand in the very end of it, then once all my fingers are in the palm part, I raise the hand to my mouth and my teeth catch the end and hold firm, so I can shove my hand properly into the glove. Let go, swap whatever I'm holding into the gloved hand, repeat with second hand.

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[everbright]

When I moved out to western missouri, I got really confused by people calling roads '40 highway' instead of 'highway 40.' I'm still trying to adjust back, now that I've moved away!

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[sara]

Oh, I would think it would make a fascinating linguistic study. Northern Californians don't use the article, Southern Californians do, Oregonians mostly don't, but they seem to be more prone to put "Highway" in as a prefix. I have no idea what they do in Washington (or Nevada or Arizona, for that matter!) But as far as I can tell there's a line somewhere around Gilroy or a little bit south of there, where suddenly highway numbers pick up an article.

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[sara]

They don't say "hella" down south, either. ;>

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[waketosleep]

No kidding. I hope there's a dialect study somewhere that incorporates it. I've never seen one that does, but it's also not my area of expertise.

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[sara]

I actually work with a linguist, but this is SO not her area of interest. I can just imagine her face if I explained that I'd come up with this great new topic for a research paper (I, er, have a bit of a tendency to come up with weird fascinating projects that eat her life. *cough* It's a personal failing.)

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[waketosleep]

You have to find someone who does regional dialect work, or recent historical linguistics, or lexicography or something, and infect them with it. :D (In Canada there's a subfield called 'Canadian English' where people do this stuff; idk what the American equivalent is, or if there is one. Canadian English and French are both weird ducks anyway.)

[mlyn]

Ahaha, I would totally do that glove thing. It is shameful how much love I put into stupid fic stuff. If anyone mentions the Tottenham Spurs, I blush and start stammering about Mycroft/Lestrade.

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[fullygoldy]

I can attest to most of this from having grown up in northern CA, but, there are a couple of exceptions. Highway 1 is always Highway 1. There's some touristy name as well ("Coastal Hwy?") but natives don't refer to it that way. Hwy 101 on the other hand is "The 101." It's also "The Alameda" (Al-short a-mee-da or Al-a-may-da). I don't remember the number designation, but "The El Camino Real" (ry-ahl) is shortened by dropping Real instead of the article. Weirdly, there is also the San Tomas Expressway which has many lanes in each direction that gets heavily used but has speed limits of 40-45 mph. If you're being formal, it's pronounced "San Thomas Expressway" (english inflection), but if you're speaking to a native, it's "San To-Mas" (spanish inflection). I spent a good deal of my childhood on that road wondering why the name of the street changed like that. I still don't know why.

I grew up taking 17 to Santa Cruz, 280 to SF and The 101 to the south bay on up to Oakland. Numbered roads are either freeways/interstates or little back roads. Here in the midwest, a lot of county roads are lettered, but I can't honestly say if roads are similarly lettered in CA. It's a big blank.

[exceptinsects]

I'm a San Diego native--we do use "the" before most numbered roads, especially large ones. Very few of them have names, and if they do, we don't really use them. Smaller country roads are more likely to be "highway 78". I've never seen any lettered roads in CA.
Let me know if you have any specific roads in mind and I'll try to help!

ETA: I don't think I've ever heard anyone say STATE highway 3, it would just be highway 3. We also don't say route 3.

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[parhelion]

I was a multi-generational Angelino, and you are absolutely right that it was never "on 1" down there but, rather, "on the 1". However, in our part of the state, we usually spoke of the 1 as "the PCH" for Pacific Coast Highway rather than "the 1" or "the Pacific Coast Highway." And my elderly mother confirmed this has been going on for many decades.

In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, we even used "the" with highway names rather than numbers: "the San Gabriel," "the Golden State," "the Rim of the World." Maybe it's because so many of our freeways initially shared names with very long and significant Southern California surface streets, resulting in "the Santa Monica" versus "Santa Monica Boulevard" or just "down on Santa Monica".

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[norah]

See, in the south bay we call it El Camino Real (no article). Agreed on Highway 1, but not 101 (no article).

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[mmegaera]

We don't use the article in Washington. Or give highways names. We refer to Interstate 5 as I-5, and to U.S. Highway 2 as U.S. 2.

[mmegaera]

Speaking as someone who grew up in Southern California in the 60s and early 70s, the article before the highway number is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one that startled me greatly when I went back down there to visit many years later.

Also, I remember a number of named highways that were marked as such on signs in the LA area, and they did take the article -- the Riverside Freeway, the Orange Freeway, the Golden State Freeway (that was I-5, I think, which is how we refer to it here in Washington state), the San Diego Freeway, etc. It's the only part of the country (and I've lived in eight states) that I know of where they do name their freeways.

[marycontrary]

I drive on 101 all the time, and I've taken 1 up from LA to enjoy the coastline. I take 1, drive 1, but I might call it the 1 or the 101 if I were specifying a road to someone else. I live in the South Bay -- I could walk due North from work to the south end of the Bay and be back before my lunch break was over. (Upthread people say Highway 1, not just 1. Um, maybe? I don't take it much, I can believe I'm overgeneralizing from 101 & 280.)

Oh hey, here's one that I've noticed: there are a lot of Spanish names scattered around, and some of them got re-pronounced as English words, and now the people who try to say them with Spanish consonants are the ones who are wrong. (But everyone will still know what you mean.) For example, there is a dorm called Junipero Serra, pronounced jew-NIP-er-oh, and you might not bother correcting people who said hu-ni-per-oh. It's always El Camino Re-al, not real, though.

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[montanaharper]

Or give highways names.

Oh, I dunno. I always refer to I-5 as "that fucking bastard freeway." Maybe that's just me? (When I lived back on the Seattle side of the Sound, I'd do virtually anything to avoid I-5. I know every mile of Aurora/99 from downtown all the way out to Shoreline.)

Not a WA native, though, and my linguistic choices are influenced both by my childhood in SoCal and my teen/adult years in Colorado. (The former has me actually calling I-5 "the 5," while the latter makes it hard for me to remember that people here say "freeway" instead of "highway" most of the time.

[montanaharper]

there are a lot of Spanish names scattered around, and some of them got re-pronounced as English words, and now the people who try to say them with Spanish consonants are the ones who are wrong.

Like San Pedro (the city). Locals pronounce it "san peedro" and if you pronounce it correctly you get weird looks.

Re: More than you ever wanted to know about California highway nomenclature.

[mmegaera]

Oh, I dunno. I always refer to I-5 as "that fucking bastard freeway."

But is that really a name or just a pejorative? [g] I do have to agree with you about I-5, although as a resident of Puyallup I really don't drive it all that often -- when I go to Seattle I ride the express bus most of the time.

I grew up in SoCal and spent a couple of years in Colorado as a teenager and college student, too. But I left California, in 1974, before people started using the article.

As for freeway vs. highway, what did me in was when I lived in Ohio and people kept calling the Interstate the expressway. That was just weird.