Ooooooooh Daaaaaaamn! Get some aloe for that burn!!! :eek::eek::D:cool:
Here’s my take on it:
Freeways are much more important down south than up north. We have more of them, and we rely on them more often. We both need them and hate them, but they are a crucial part of our lives. Therefore, we treat them with both respect and familiarity.
If you look at it, the full official name would be, for example, “The 405 freeway”. Consider that as mapping to “Dr. Roberta Jones.” If you have been Dr. Jones’ patient for a long time and are comfortable with her, you might call her “Dr. Roberta”. So it is with Southern Californians and their freeways - we call them by both their honorific (because we respect them and fear their wrath) and their first name (because we are on a more intimate basis with them). Thus, “The 405.”
Northerners, though, don’t have the same respect-and-fear relationship with the freeways that we do, so they just use the freeway’s “first name” - like calling Dr. Jones “Roberta”.
I’ve lived in both Southern and Northern California. IMO this is just a shibboleth used by northerners to tell when they they are talking with a southerner.
As for why they think it’s important, it goes to the heart of native Northern Californians that they are NOT from Southern California. Sometimes I include the “the” just to mess with people; I’ve been in the Bay Area for 33 years now.
Calling SF “The City” is cute and quaint (Awww! They act as though there’s only one city!), but we shouldn’t really talk down here, since we have “The Valley” despite there being two major valleys* and several minor ones**, all within the general LA area.
But aren’t San Franciscans (or Bay Area residents) unusual in that they do this when they are hundreds or thousands of miles away from home? So if they’re in L.A. or Denver or perhaps even New York, the City to them means SF? I realize that not everyone does it, of course.
Although I’ve been living in North County for three years, I haven’t managed to pick up on what the most common usage is in the San Diego area. One reason is that through most of the region, in contrast to L.A., we have only one interstate, I-5. State and county routes tend to be more important here, but even these usually have regular names like ordinary roads.
This probably correct, in my opinion. Not only is L.A. less compact, but there are also many districts which have continued to use their old pre-annexation names, like in most of the San Fernando Valley. Chatsworth, Van Nuys, Studio City, etc., all do this and if you referred to these areas or addressed mail as going to “Los Angeles” it would only confuse people.
South of Mulholland this is less common and aside from legally independent enclaves just about everything is considered L.A., but exceptions exist even there. The famous “90210” zip code actually belongs mostly to a section of Los Angeles known as Beverly Hills Post Office. When ZIP codes were introduced in the early 1960s, USPS assigned it to the main post office in Beverly Hills so everyone began writing their addresses as Beverly Hills rather than L.A.
Usually if an address has a 900 zip code it’s referred to and should be addressed as being in Los Angeles, though again Hollywood fits this criterion but usually continues to be known as Hollywood. Palms is a similar case, but to a lesser extent. It was considered a minor triumph for community identity when they successfully agitated for the local metro station to be named simply “Palms” rather than “Palms Boulevard”.
So indeed, saying “The City” in reference to L.A. would be quite ambiguous.
When I moved to L.A., my apartment was on Clarington at Palms, which is in the City of Los Angeles. My mom sent me a card/letter, and it took a long time to arrive from San Diego. Though the ZIP code was correct, she’d used Culver City as the city name.
Could be, I suppose. But I’ve not encountered that. I live about 50 miles south of SF, and although I think of it as “the city”, that would only be in the context of it being the nearest big city (San Jose, though larger, is not a “big city”; it’s a “big suburb with a small downtown area”).
Ahem. Three major interstates? Here in Atlanta we have three major interstates that are known exclusively by number, either with or without a preceding “I”, and one that has an unofficial name. Although even then you’ll hear it called “285” about as often as it’s called “the Perimeter”*. To be fair to Doctor Jackson, it’s a bypass around the city, so it’s not really an interstate. But it’s called Interstate 285, and gets the red-and-blue shield sign.
There are a number of smaller interstates that debouch off the major interstates, such as I-675 and I-985. Interestingly, though, while you will hear Atlantans speak of “Eye-Twenny”, we never afford these spur highways the initial - they’re always “Five Seventy-Five” or “Nine Eighty-Five”.
Georgia, outside Atlanta, has two other interstates that run through it for significant distances - I-95 and I-16 - and a couple that dip their toes in the state - I-59 and I-24. I don’t know how Georgians near those highways speak of them.
*The most common usage of “Perimeter” that I hear is as a cultural divider between “ITP” - “inside the Perimeter”, the land of fine restaurants, world-class institutions of the arts, and civilization - and "OTP, “outside the Perimeter”, a howling desert of Olive Gardens, WalMarts, and Trump supporters. :D. Not that those of us who live ITP are snobs, or anything.
Frisco, North Carolina. Lovely little Outer Banks community, where Mrs. SMV and I like to vacation. Best beaches in the U.S.
“The” before larger numbers doesn’t bother me too much. But for small numbers, it just sounds completely wrong. Take “the 5” sounds a whole lot worse than “take the 405” or whatever.
That said, in my area, we don’t tend to use the definite article. We do nearly always add the direction after the highway number, though. Except, for some reason, for Interstate highways, where such seems to be optional.
My guess is that a number by itself just seems to not be enough.
Manhattan itself, which is what people usually mean by “New York City” has about 1.5M inhabitants today, and SF has about 800K, so it’s not exactly a village even by NYC standards.
Not to disparage the other four boroughs, but legal and civic status aside, do people really think of them as conceptually and culturally part of NYC in the same way they do Manhattan? (Certain baseball venues excepted, of course!). If I addressed a letter to a Brooklyn ZIP code but gave “New York” as the city, would it get there as fast?
I may be totally off base and I’ve never been there. But I may have a chance of repairing that omission very soon.
