Date:  Thu, 1 Dec 1994 11:58:33 EST

From:  Larry Horn <LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU>

Subject: Re: "the" 101



I shouldn't presume to speak for Alan, but I believe the claim is not that

'the 101' would be used everywhere except northern California, but rather that

it would be used nowhere except southern California, where its use derives

from the earlier default labels using names ("the San(ta) X Freeway") rather

than numbers, but now expanded productively to freeways/highways that never

had any non-numerical names. Elsewhere (e.g. in the Bay Area, in Iowa, in New

Hampshire), highways don't generally come with names (although some do--the

Bayshore Freeway, the Spaulding Turnpike, the Garden State Turnpike, the [New

York] Thruway,...), and so there's no productively applicable source for the

"truncation". In that respect, the process is more motivated than the

corresponding one we've been speaking about for S.F. neighborhoods, where the

rule in question ("the X district"-->"the X", for X = Castro, Mission, Sunset,

etc.) is arbitrarily confined to San Francisco.



Larry