CNN is reporting the weather, and the weather woman mentioned the Pineapple Express; so called because it is a warm storm from Hawaii. I haven’t heard that term since I left L.A.
Which reminded me of our friend Coastal Eddie. And June Gloom. I’ve heard that SigAlert may not be well-known outside of California. And in L.A. freeways are the [number] instead of ‘I5’ or ‘Highway 14’ or whatever. Not too long ago I discovered that chili size is a SoCal term. More regionally, in the Antelope Valley L.A. is called Down Below.
The Southland and Santa Anas. Two terms that are so familiar that, like the chili-covered open-faced burger, it never occured to me that they were regional.
Some Northerners claim that putting “the” in front of a Freeway number - as in “The 405”- is a So-Calism. However, although it seems more common there, it occurs up here too, albeit disliked by some. Of course, those that dislike “the” usually use very local nicknames for sections of freeway (such as “Hospital curve”) which means that their traffic reports are often useless.
Down in the LA area, you’ll hear “South Bay” refering to Manhatten Beach and so forth. But there’s a South Bay in the SJ/SF region too.
This may be more of a west coast thing, but ‘Marine Layer’ took me a while to figure out. Back East we call that fog.
You ever post something that you’re pretty sure someone is going to come along and correct? I have a bad feeling about this post. I really hope I haven’t been misunderstanding ‘marine layer’ all this time.
I find myself using “the” with highways I associate with SoCal. I take 280 to 85 to 17 to get to Santa Cruz, but I take 580 to the 5 to the 210 to the 60 (or whatever) to get to Riverside. Anyone referring to the 280 is swiftly and harshly reprimanded.
The marine layer is different from fog, in that it doesn’t (necessarily) touch the surface. A marine layer is a layer of clouds, often a few thousand feet deep, that lies below an inversion layer.
For some reason, “Cruisin’ the 'Shaw” was the first thing to come to mind, but that probably has more to do with the community and culture I grew up in.
I think that the above posts have already named just about everything I would have thought of. The only thing that comes to mind, which may or may not qualify, is the “Four-Level” - I haven’t heard of any place else in the country that uses that term, although I could be wrong. It refers to the junction of the 5, 10, 101 and 110 Freeways on the north end of Downtown. I don’t even know how common it is to have such an intersection anywhere else, though.
Sig Alerts are used up here as well. They’re named for radio engineer Lloyd Sigmon, who developed an automatic device that monitored police radio and listened for certain alert tones. Of course, you’d think “Stay In Garage” would be a good translation for them.
Most of our “pet” names for roads and traffic points of interest are explained at the bottom of this page.
If you know that they’re referring to a goosenecked section of 101 behind SF General Hospital, you wouldn’t think “Hospital Curve” is a silly name. Would you rather have them say "there’s a stall on the really curvy section of Highway 101 near San Francisco General Hospital?
Being from not So Cal, feel free to correct me, but it seems to me that if you’re anywhere within Santa Barbara/Victorville/Palm Springs/San Juan Capistrano, you’re “from LA.” No one pulls that up here.
No, most of the places you mention are definitely not L.A, and people who live there would not say they’re from L.A. Indeed, I still have to laugh at the person I was once talking to who came from Torrance, and went to such lengths to establish how much better life was there, instead of L.A. which was across the street.
Santa Barbara proudly considers itself Central Coast, even though they’re only about 100 miles north of us. Geographically and topographically, however, I think they’re justified in making that claim. Either way, it’s not L.A. San Juan is a lazy little beach town that the Amtrak runs through, psychologically a million miles from L.A. Although, some people do live there and commute to jobs in L.A. by train.
The names of the roads are interesting to me. As Johnny says, we now say The + the number, as in, “Take the 405 north until you pass the merge with the 5…”.
But when I was a kid, in the 60s and 70s, it was much more common to use the names of the freeways, as in, “Take the San Diego Freeway past the merge with the Golden State.”
Well, like I said, I’m not from there, so I just picked a couple of points of Google Maps. But my point still stands. People who “live in LA” usually live near LA. There’s a big difference between in San Francisco and near San Francisco- as in city limits- so it’s always a WTF moment for me when people who live “in LA” are three freeways and half an hour east from Dodger Stadium.
Massive immigration into SoCal in the last 20 years. Us natives still use the names sometimes, but new Californians just got confused. It was just easier to refer to the numbers rather than the names. Besides, the numbers don’t change - the 5 is the 5 from Canada to Mexico. Most of the rest of the freeways change names every 50 miles or so.
