Look, if you have ever been in the Golden Sate, you would know that in general, SoCalers say “take *THE *405…” while in general NoCals would say “Take 880…”.
However the line is quite fuzzy. Fairly often a Norcal will say “take the 101…” . More common on the 101 freeway, and never emphasized like SoCalers do.
Still, it’s there.
But mention this to a Norcal and they get livid, as if you are accusing them of goat fucking or something. Mention to a SoCal that they say “The 101” and they just shrug. Or if they dont say “the”. No big deal to a Los Angelino.
I mean, it’s a small difference and of course there’s not wall or dividing line* between North and South and people move and travel back and forth all the time.
I lived in both sections, mostly in the North. But even when I has a Norcal guy recorded as saying “the 101” he got angry and denied it. A shibboleth?
and no one can agree on where the line is between North and South anyway.
It’s a stupid “dispute,” and like all of these “disputes” between north and south, it’s almost entirely in the heads of the people of the north. I’ve lived in both places, too, and can attest to that.
And it’s not as cut and dried as people say. In Southern California people do use the definite article more, but that’s because they don’t use terms such as Highway and Interstate, which restricts usage of the definite article, and which is comparatively more common in the north.
What’s happening is that the SF Bay Area just has fewer major freeways, so there are a handful that are much more salient in public discourse, and–it’s true–those are pretty much always referred to without the definite article. In Southern California, people are much more likely to be intimately familiar with a broader array of freeways, and are dropping the term freeway and using numbers as a name. People in the Bay Area are more like to use the full names (with the few they have)–hence the Nimitz Freeway, the McArthur Freeway, and here they DO use the definite article.
Furthermore, people in Southern California actually DO drop the the definite article quite often, when referring to a freeway that they rarely use or are unfamiliar with.
Center divider in the middle of State Route 99, a few miles north of Fresno, is the dividing line between southern and northern California. At this point, there are two adjacent trees planted there: A palm tree (marking Southern California) and some kind of pine for fir tree (marking Northern California).
This is supposed to symbolically represent the geographic center of the state. Actually, AIUI, that geographic center is many miles to the east of this point, up in the Sierras somewhere. But the marker on the highway (the two trees) is placed at the corresponding latitude.
Don’t bring any of that “the” crap when talking about freeways to Washington. A few years ago a commercial for a local company referred the freeway exit to take as exit 142 of the 5 freeway. The company was blasted by the locals and the media. They claimed it was the Los Angeles based advertising company they hired.
ISTM that people in NorCal spend a lot of time being offended by people in SoCal. When I was in my native Southern California, nobody paid any attention to NorCal at all.
This. When I moved there in the late 80s, I couldn’t believe how much hate there was for the Dodgers. In LA, we never even talked about the Giants. In the Bay Area, it’s their biggest rivalry. Don’t even ask me about take out containers.
It doesn’t fly in Washington, D.C. either, but you wouldn’t know it from watching TV shows. Apparently it never occurs to L.A. based scriptwriters that not everyone in the nation shares their peculiar speech.
Yes! I don’t care what people in CA (north or south) do, but if the character is from the northeast, and the action is in the northeast, it’s not “The 95”! I wouldn’t even say “Interstate 95” as they have them do sometimes, but that’s less egregious than “The 95”.
Eh, in the Cleveland area we don’t usually use those terms, either, and we still don’t need definite articles. We’ll say things like “Take 90 to the Columbia exit”, or “71 south to 480”.
We do have “the Shoreway”, but for much of its length that doesn’t even have an interstate number.
I think that that’s because the rest of the schools in our university system are all called “_____ State University”. So, for instance, Kent State University is an Ohio state university, as is Bowling Green State University or Cleveland State University. But the one in Columbus is the Ohio State University.
Interestingly, this sort of came up on Jeopardy yesterday. Alex was reading the answer:
And he read “the 10 freeway” as “the number 10 freeway”. Like saying “the number 10 train”, or something. I know he’s from Canada, but he must have lived in LA forlikeever. No one takes “the number 405 freeway”.
Ironically, I don’t think anyone in L.A. would use the article for PCH (*the PCH).
But that speaks to what I was getting at above. These usages evolve from the ellipsis of the terms freeway and highway in Southern and Northern CA respectively.
S.CAL: Take the five freeway => Take the five . . :
N CAL: Take highway eight-eighty => Take . . . eight-eighty.
By the same token, people in Southern California drop the title Interstate. No one in in L.A would say, *“Take the Interstate five.” Hence:
S.CAL: Take interstate fifteen to escondido => Take fifteen to escondido.
As I said, in Southern California people do in fact drop the article when talking about less familiar roads.
