Discussion Forum (Archived)
Guest
I am aware that in California people use the in front of highway numbers, and when I moved to Buffalo that's one of the first things I noticed about Western New Yorkers whenever they would give me directions somewhere.
Does any other part of the country do this? And does anywhere at all call it "the First Avenue"?
It's not all of California; in my experience, only residents of the Los Angeles area precede highway numbers with the definite article. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have visited parts of Northern California and the San Diego region (though Martha would be much more qualified to talk about that), and have never heard anyone in those places use that construction.
Dan
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
I defer to your superior knowledge of San Diego regional parlance, for sure. My experience is limited to a sales award trip to Rancho Bernardo in 1977, a one-week training course several years ago, and two weekend visits with my cousin in El Cajon. Not enough for a statistically significant sample.
Dan
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
I'm from Los Angeles originally, and it's interesting to hear that other places do use that "the" when talking about highways. I find it very hard now in Oregon to strip that "the" out when giving directions.
A former-Los-Angeleno friend of mine posited that in So Cal, the "the" is a hang-over from using the names of the freeways: The Ventura Freeway, the Hollywood Freeway, the San Diego Freeway. When the numbers became a shorthand for the full name, the "the" just stuck (eg, "you take the Hollywood Freeway south" becomes "you take the 170 south." Just a guess. It seems named freeways aren't really big in other places.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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