Get "The" To A …

One of the Orlando Sentinel "blogs," Across The Pond: An American's guide for UK visitors, recently posted an article titled 'Don't drive on "The" 27 — Pu-lease!'. The gist is that here in Central Fla., we don't preface road references with the word "the" like Southern Californians do. (So, for example, someone in LA might call I-5 "the 5" while we call I-4 simply "I-4" — if not some unsavory expletive.)

Given the amount of dialoge and interchange (no pun intended) I have with work counterparts in SoCal, this conversation has come up more than once in recent months. However, since the Sentinel's blog-commenting system requires your full email to be posted (why, hello, spam bots!), I'll put my commentary here, instead.

It's true we don't say "the 4." But we DO say things like "the 408," "the 429," or "the 417." Of course, when we still call a road by a non-numbered name we need a "the" to gramatically make sense (the Turnpike, the East-West, the GreeneWay, the Beeline Beachline) — though, oddly, I think the latter one doesn't get called "the 528." And, as if to prove the rule by exception, I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "THE Osceola Parkway." And I had to laugh when the traffic station on Sirius called John Young Parkway "the J Y P."

(In all fairness, the Sentinel's own standards appear to reference "the 408" as just "State Road 408," validating the blog-author's commentary. By the way, can someone better explain TrackBack to me? The original article's TrackBack link — http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/7708186 — appears not to work for me.) UPDATE: Bj found an explanation over here. Suffice it to say, TrackBack doesn't seem to be worth the trouble.