Quote:
Originally Posted by KevinW
But the entire reason Southern Californians put the "The" in front of numbered highways is they used to be named. So you'd put a The in front of the name. The Ventura Highway, etc. When they started putting in a uniformed numbering system, we couldn't stop saying "The" to denote we were talking about a highway.
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That's the most sensible explanation. The numbers probably make the most sense, but evoke little--for instance, as they do in this famous excerpt from Didon's
Play It as It Lays:
"Maria drove the freeway. She dressed every morning with a greater sense of purpose than she had felt in some time, a cotton skirt, a jersey, sandals she could kick off when she wanted the touch of the accelerator, and she dressed very fast, running a brush through her hair once or twice and tying it back with a ribbon, for it was essential (to pause was to throw herself into unspeakable peril) that she be on the freeway by ten o'clock. Not somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard, not on her way to the freeway, but actually on the freeway. If she was not she lost the day's rhythm, its precariously imposed momentum. Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove
the San Diego to
the Harbor, the Harbor up to
the Hollywood, the Hollywood to
the Golden State,
the Santa Monica,
the Santa Ana,
the Pasadena,
the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour, Normandie ¼ Vermont ¾ Harbor Fwy 1. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated...."