Well, I’m a SoCalian and I hate the Dodgers…I’m an Angels fan :). But the Giants are their biggest rivals going back to their NYC days. One of the most memorable and horrifying moment in Dodger history was Juan Marichal hitting Johnny Roseboro over the head with his bat. The hatred is legendary. Remember the unfortunate Giant fan almost killed by two thugs in Chavez Ravine parking lot?
Is it our fault that the rest of America gets it wrong? 
I generally use the SiriusXM traffic channel before I get underway, and I can always tell when they hire someone from out of town to do the Detroit traffic report. If you call I-94 “The 94” we know you ain’t from 'round these parts.
and don’t get me started on titling a TV show Detroit 1-8-7. I admit that “Detroit 750.316” doesn’t really roll off the tongue, but they could have come up with a better title.
As I’ve mentioned before, y’all are ruining Arizona. Our newscaster speak some weird hybrid, saying things like “Traffic on the I-10”, mixing the definite article usage of SoCal with the “I-10/Interstate 10” usage the rest of the country uses.
I blame all the LA folk that moved here. Go home, and take your definite article with you!
[QUOTE=Alex Trebek]
The McClure Tunnel in Santa Monica marks the western terminus of the 10 freeway, which transitions to this highway, the PCH.
[/quote]
By the way, this particular junction described by Trebek is what the worlds sees when it logs in to Microsoft 365 Online. Was that part of the clue he gave?
You can start blaming the LA folk after you stop doing what you do to the San Diego folk every summer.
Last century I spent decades in Northern California and never witnessed — not even once — anyone get upset by theSoCal “the.” It might have seemed quaint enough to get a comment — is that what “upset” means? Or is this alleged irritation a 21st-century development?
So it’s not true that when a LA’er refers to “The City” he means the City high on a hill by the bay? :o
The problem with this article is that it doesn’t point out that the parts of Southern California–especially L.A.–which appear in media are very limited to just certain areas.
So it actually should be called “WestLA-ization.” People in other parts of L.A. are just as annoyed by this phenomenon as people in other parts of the country. Just about every snarky thing Woody Allen has said about L.A. in his movies applies to only a very small aspect of this huge city.
Nope. I got the question wording off J-archive, and I think they are exact. Jibes with my memory, at any rate.
Native Southern Californian, born in Lakewood (L.A. County), lived 11 years in San Diego, 11 years in the Antelope Valley (Northern L.A. County), and 17 years in the City of L.A. I don’t recall ever hearing anyone referring to any city as ‘The City’.
(Though when I lived in the AV, south of the mountains – and especially L.A. – were commonly called ‘Down Below’.)
More or less. We (I’m a NorCal guy) don’t mind the SoCalers so much as long as they stay in SoCal. But when they come up here, what with their “the 101” lingo and all, we know who they are and don’t want them here. We don’t want to turn into them.
And we all pretty much know how it started. Freeways around LA were historically referred to by name: The Santa Monica Freeway, etc. Shifting over to numbers, they kept the “The”. We have “The Bayshore” freeway (aka, 101), but that’s about it. Maybe “The Nimitz”, but mostly just numbers.
There’s a long running column “Mr. Roadshow” in the San Jose Merc for discussion of traffic issues. About once a year, he’ll devote an entire column to people’s gripes about hearing “The” in front of freeway names. It’s one of those things that people like to pretend to be upset about. They don’t hate the terminology, they just hate the people who use it.
I lived in and around Boston for many years, and we used to hate the New Yorkers coming up and telling us how much better a city New York was, and blah blah fucking blah. Same thing. You see it everywhere.
Here in South Dakota, we just refer to the interstates as ‘The Interstate’. If you need more specificity, we say ‘I-90’ or ‘I-29’ (we only have the two and I-29 only runs down the eastern part of the state). Other highways are usually referred to as ‘Highway (number)’ or just ‘(number)’.
The custom in Ontario seems to be to put the road type (like “highway” or “county road”) in front of the number, at least on first occurrence, so there is no definite article for non-freeways: “Take Highway 21 north to county road 65, then follow 65 east to …”. But the definite article is always used for the freeways which are all three-digit numbers beginning with “4”: “the 401”, “the 407”, etc. It strikes me as natural I suppose because I hear it so much, but it also makes sense because the major freeways are so familiar that their designations seem more like names than numbers, so you’d use the definite article in the same sense as you would say “take the Gardiner Expressway”.
So if I was in SoCal and heard someone talk about “the 405” I’d feel like I was at home!
Wiki disagrees:
But yes, that is more or less the Geographical center. But there is also a political center, a biological center (Pt Conception divides North from South coastal biomes) and a population center.
Well, yeah, but that’s normal. 
Nope, that’s only a Frisco thing.
I lived in San Jose, so when people said “We’re going up to the City.” the response was always : “But you’re in The City?” (San Jose being much larger than SF).
Background: I grew up in LA, went to college and grad school in San Diego and have lived in Santa Barbara for the last 27 years.
As the saying goes, there is a huge war between Southern California and Northern California but only the people in Northern California know about it. And it’s true. I didn’t have the faintest idea about the scope of the perceived rivalry until I went to college at UCSD and lived in a dorm full of people mostly from throughout the State. They had tons of SoCal jokes and snarky comments and we were all like “Um, I don’t know. Your bridges are cool.” It’s some kind of weird compensation for an unnecessary inferiority complex as far as I can tell.
And see- why on earth would you be annoyed by a little definite article? 
Again- why on earth would you be annoyed by a little definite article? “Blasted”?? :eek: