I think they probably leave that part out of 4th-grade history. I don’t remember getting all the way up to the Depression anyway–it kind of went: Yokut Indians, Drake, missions, gold rush, done. But then, I lived in Bakersfield at the time, so probably it was hushed up. 
I’ve always heard it was a Bay Area expression, but Gwen Stefani and No Doubt certainly didn’t come from there. They come from Orange County, which is south of L.A. and is (IMHO) pretty much everything people say they hate about L.A. increased by an order of magnitude or several. A couple of years ago we went down there to have dinner with my wife’s cousins, three generations of them. They all lived in different areas in or near the OC. It seemed as if each generation lived about 10 or 12 miles from each other, and the driving was all along main drag boulevards that didn’t seem to have any center or concentration of business or culture, just one Coco’s or Ihop, then a gas station, then a Target, another IHOP, and so on. It’s almost completely urbanized, yet there seem to be no cities.
Does anyone up there still say the name of the freeway, like the Admiral Nimitz? That used to be very common here a couple of generations ago, but has diminished considerably. I think in the old days when they were being built, and then were still fairly new, people were more used to saying, for example, the San Diego Freeway*.
*Especially odd they named it that–like all #0# interstates, it’s a bypass. It doesn’t even go to San Diego, but joins the 5 in OC.
We SoCalers don’t say this, but it doesn’t sound wrong to me. Better than “Take 5…”, which does.
Yeah, if someone told me to take 5 north, I would probaly know what they were talking about…but I would also probably ask “take 5 *what * north?”
Actually, everyone I know around here calls them “Northern California” and “Southern California”
Native Californian (born in La Jolla) reporting in.
Hey, dudes, what’s the happs? 10-4 and out the door. Hasta luego, bro.
Later.
As someone pointed out upthread, it’s because you don’t just say, “Take 5”… You say, “Take *the *five north past the *the *ninety-one up to *the *six-oh-five.” The only word omitted is freeway, as in the Five Freeway, not Interstate 5 (which doesn’t require a preceding ‘the’).
ETA: I never heard anyone refer to the freeway as interstate until I moved out to the midwest. And nobody even says freeway here. Everything’s a highway.
I’m a 4th generation California born; my family ran the hotel in Long Beach when it was a lil trainstop. We came from the Midwest, Nebraska, Missouri, and a waystay in North Louisiana.So, that accent was pretty Midwestern, which I see the California accent as being, amended now by hip terms and faster patter.
I moved at 8 to LonnnGilannd, NY, then Maine,“yaapp”, then to the South at 13, “Hey, Y’all”. Then down to Mississippi for 13 years. Got a softly inflected Southern mutt accent now, not the real deal. By gentle assimilation.
I remember going back to visit family in Newport Beach, OC, and having my closest cousin laugh at what came out of my mouth; “Oh, Gawddd, you have got such an Axxeennnt!” where, hers sounded so funny to me, very Valley Gal, and not at all how our elder generation spoke.
What I have noticed with visiting Californians to the South, now that I am pretty much assimilated, is that y’all talk real fast, and don’t wait for someone to finish talking before talking too. And, this is a holdover for me as well, when I get whupped up on a topic, I’ll interject , expecting that my CA family MO is fine, everybody talking, sort it out. It’s kinda rude here, I’ve found.
And, in Mississippi, where I was leading CA folks around to document Southern Culture, all the fast talk would often get met with a wall of silence, which the CA folks didn’t get at all, just not on the cultural radar. In CA, ya speak up, and often. It wasn’t a stonewall at all, but, more, a deciding that , “Nahhh, I’m not going to be wasting that energy on the yammer. Why don’t you listen a bit better?”
Being between worlds, I saw what was happening; just different ways of talking. And could mediate it, knowing where both parties spoke and came from.
An American mutt’s expierience. I still say Freeway fer Highway though.
When I was growing up in SoCal in the 70s and 80s, we referred to most of the freeways by their numbers. The exception was the Harbor Freeway, which seemed to be interchangeable with the one-ten and sometimes, but less often, the San Diego Freeway as opposed to just the four-oh-five. For some reason, the Santa Monica freeway was the I-10, as opposed to just the ten. I dunno why, extra vowels had a nicer cadence, I guess. And the Century Freeway was still mostly under construction when I left CA, but we called it the Century, which was in retrospect as much commentary on how long it would probably take to complete as whatever reason it was called that to begin with (I have no idea).
There seemed to be a bit of change up depending upon how specific you needed to be. Amongst my family, it was pretty much all numbers, though. Even at a young age, I became very proficient at figuring out which freeways we’d take to get just about anywhere in the Southland. My memory is becoming increasingly hazy as the years out of California pass.
And I loved reading the Thomas Guide while chillin’ in the backseat on long drives.
Around here, referring to freeways, people say, “Take 5 south to 80 east.” Never “the 5” and not “Interstate 5” and mostly not “I-5.” Typically, just the numbers.
Freeway names are not used in common conversation with perhaps the exception of the “Capital City Freeway” aka “Business 80” or just “Bus. 80” (pronounced “Biz 80”).
I believe most of the SoCal freeway names were adopted before the current numbering system.
So, the “San Diego Freeway” goes from LA to San Diego, but now has two numbers attached to it (north of “The Y” is now numbered 405 and south of “The Y” is now numbered 5).
The “Santa Ana Freeway” is now numbered 5 from “The Y” to the East LA Interchange.
The “Golden State Freeway” is now numbered 5 from the East LA Interchange to the 5-99 split.
So, if you take 5 from Kern County to San Diego, you will travel through three different freeway names all sharing the number.
The bottom line here is that the LA freeway names and freeway numbers don’t necessarily match up with each other.
Sort of interesting in that even today we think of Bakersfield as similar to the rural midwest in a lot of ways–not just because they’re all rural areas, but because of things like country music, which the Okies no doubt brought with them.
I read an article recently the point of which that the cultural and political divide between the north and south is not nearly as important as that between coast and interior.
Come to think of it, “I-5” is what everyone called it when I got to UC San Diego in 1975.
I’ve always been amused by the way the interchanges are signed apparently without any regard to local relevance. On the 134, approaching the 405, you can chose to go either south (to Santa Monica) or to…Sacramento!