The 5, the 101, the 405: Why Southern Californians Love Saying 'the' Before Freeway Numbers

[KamaAina]

http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/history/la-as-subject/the-5-the-101-the-405-why-southern-californians-love-saying-the-before-freeway-numbers.html

Southern Californians have a distinctive -- "Saturday Night Live's" Fred Armisen and Kristen Wiig might say funny -- way of giving directions. To get from Santa Monica to Hollywood, take the 10 to the 110 to the 101. Burbank to San Diego? The 134 to the 5. And, if you can, always avoid the 405.

Why the definite articles? After all, a resident of the Bay Area enjoys coastal drives along "101" or takes "80 east" to Sacramento. Most of North America, in fact, omits the "the" before route numbers.

The answer begins with the region's early embrace of the freeway. Long before the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 gave most U.S. cities their first freeways, Los Angeles had built several. These weren't simply extensions of federal interstate highways through the city; they were local routes, engineered to carry local traffic and (partly) paid for by local funds. It only made sense that, as they opened one by one, they'd get local names, ones that succinctly denoted their route or destination. The freeway through the Cahuenga Pass thus became the Cahuenga Pass Freeway, and Angelenos knew the freeway to San Bernardino as the San Bernardino Freeway....

Although the transition was gradual -- numbers only eclipsed names in common usage in the late 1970s, and Caltrans still included the old names in signage through the 1990s -- Southern Californians eventually joined the rest of North America in referring to freeways by number. But when they did, they retained their old habit of prefixing a definite article, the, giving rise to a regional idiom that still confounds and amuses outsiders today.

[tularetom]

1. LOL, my granddaughter never did that until she went to college at CSULB

Now she's got all of us doing it.

Of course it's becoming more common up here in the Appalachia of CA now that we have all these SoCal refugees living here. Mostly retirees from LAPD.

[NV Whino]

2. Well, there was The Nimitz

But we don't call it The 17… or whatever the hell it's called today. I've lost track, actually.

[KamaAina]

3. 880.

I've even heard SoCalers refer to the trains that run under the Bay as "the BART"!

[NV Whino]

4. It's all that smog

Softens the brain.

[olddots]

5. here are the directions to the Regan Library

take the Dip Shit Freeway west to the White Trash Freeway north and take the Brain Dead exit to Senile Parkway .

[NBachers]

7. Comment of the day

[Galileo126]

6. I always wondered about that...

I moved from Rhode Island to SoCal in 1987, and it always stymied me.

Funny thing was, when someone told me to "Take the San Bernardino Freeway", I always had to ask "What route number is that?"

After all these years, resistance was futile. I now "take the 10"...

[denbot]

8. Wow, I never realized there was any other way to say it

I just assumed everyone else used "the".

[mackerel]

9. Yeah I work with this chick who is always saying take The 5 to The 4. First time I heard

her say it, I says Where the feck are you from? She says San Diego.

I just shook my head and thought she lose The but she's been her four years and still using The damn The.