"The 101"

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:25 AM -0400 8/26/03, Barnhart wrote:
>
>
>I, too, have heard this precise formula used only on the radio.
>However, most of Route 9 in the Hudson Valley is two lanes between
>Poughkeepsie and Albany.  One short section is four lanes wide in the
>vicinity of Rhinebeck.  Locals there have been known to refer to that
>section as "the 4 lane."  Is this something different because it is not
>referred to as "the 9"?  I remember when visiting Nova Scotia that the
>locals differentiated between dirt roads and "the pavement."
>
Yes, I think that's quite different.  "The four-lane" is like "the
highway", "the expressway", "the freeway", a standard description.
What's odd about the L.A. usage (which as we saw earlier has spread
northward some time ago to Santa Barbara, judging from that old usage
in an early Sue Grafton book I cited, and more recently southward to
San Diego) is that numbers for freeways are (or were) their names,
not descriptions, and names in English don't usually take
determiners.  (Of course, there's always "The Fonz", who also started
in L.A., "The Rock", "The Big Kahuna", etc.)  In our earlier thread
on these, there was some speculation about whether "the 101" derived
from "the 101 Freeway".  I think I wondered (either in that thread or
just internally) whether the shift involved the fact that in the old
days most of the freeways in the area were designated by geographical
name rather than number ("The Hollywood/Santa Monica/San Diego
Freeway"), which allowed for the dropping of "Freeway" but obviously
not the article ("The Hollywood/Santa Monica/San Diego"), and that
the first instances of "the N" may have involved those that didn't
have names ("the 405 Freeway" > "the 405").  (Or was it "the 605"?
It's been a while.)   All total speculation of course, but it's
partially supported by the fact that the practice of using
geographical names for freeways was mostly an L.A. thang (yes, I
know, there's the "Bayshore Freeway" as a moniker for 101 on the
Peninsula, but did people really call it that?).

larry