tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post8318543636838511726..comments2024-03-16T00:21:43.240+00:00Comments on Separated by a Common Language: talking about streets, roads, etc.lynneguisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10171345732985610861noreply@blogger.comBlogger162125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-68622057230285095462023-03-30T20:23:03.183+01:002023-03-30T20:23:03.183+01:00The usual system in the US is that houses are numb...The usual system in the US is that houses are numbered according to the main parallel street in the city centre, which would be a long major roadway. So, for instance, you use the main north-south central street as the template for all lesser roads that run roughly north-south. If a minor road runs parallel to the bit of main street numbered in the 4500s, then that small road has house numbers in the 4500s.<br /><br />It leads to weirdly high numbering, but it does have the advantage that you can speak of the "4500s block" of such-and-such road, and someone familiar with the city will know roughly where in town you're referring to.Robbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13817438530048331339noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-31555435574411301932020-06-29T15:29:03.883+01:002020-06-29T15:29:03.883+01:00Another late addition:
In the Netherlands, you can...Another late addition:<br />In the Netherlands, you can give your address as:<br />3842WB, 18; and that too would be a unique designation. Any address-oriented computer program worth its salt will translate this into a particular stretch of a particular street or road, with the housenumber 18. Petra1945https://www.blogger.com/profile/06559677258676647710noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-18538871953301284752019-07-21T18:04:03.320+01:002019-07-21T18:04:03.320+01:00One of my favourites is St. Peter’s Close. Should ...One of my favourites is St. Peter’s Close. Should he residents be worried?Shy-replyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01891566073375322808noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-55935874449126728332018-07-19T16:52:52.832+01:002018-07-19T16:52:52.832+01:00I think my parents' local paper kept it well i...I think my parents' local paper kept it well into the 1980s; don't know when they dropped it. Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)https://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-52368570037571869792018-07-06T13:23:52.866+01:002018-07-06T13:23:52.866+01:00Any idea when the British dropped the dash in the ...Any idea when the British dropped the dash in the street name, e.g. Mill-road, High-street, Station-road? Lots of old newspaper articles are written this way.<br />Matthewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02027332620204904993noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-85285191138712792142018-05-26T15:24:49.454+01:002018-05-26T15:24:49.454+01:00Burlington, Vermont has a North Avenue and a Nort...Burlington, Vermont has a North Avenue and a North Street which intersect. One local standup comic joked about the corner of North and North and I've been meaning to get a picture ever since.nlpnthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16925589671848667697noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-25114090704206262122018-02-08T23:28:43.006+00:002018-02-08T23:28:43.006+00:00A few people mentioned Queens...
Avenues go east/...A few people mentioned Queens...<br /><br />Avenues go east/west, streets go north south, cross streets between the avenues that don't go all the way through have the same number as the avenue but are named Road, drive, or Terrace. Boulevards, turnpikes, parkways are named...but avenues can be named, too. Named streets kinda do whatever they want.<br /><br />Addresses go XX-YY where XX (or XXX) is cross street and YY is house #.<br /><br />Also, the large house numbers isn't always a thing. It's very common on Long Island for there to be 1 or 2 digit house numbers. I grew up at a single digit address.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-15697313284610791092017-07-27T13:25:27.767+01:002017-07-27T13:25:27.767+01:00Oh dear!
Mrs Redboots has just now (July 2017) re...Oh dear!<br /><br />Mrs Redboots has just now (July 2017) repeated her point about <i><b>at</b> Brighton </i> in Agatha Christie etc. And I've more-or-less repeated my reply. Not precisely, because I interpreted the OED slightly differently. And I didn't look up <i>A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language</i> this time.<br /><br />Also I wrote<br /><br />This accords with the OED's 1885 observation that <i>at London</i> was used 'formerly more widely'.<br /><br />I was misguided by the OED disclaimer that <b>at</b> and not been fully revised since the 1885 First Edition. But presumably the remark could have been inserted in a minor revision between 1885 and 1989.<br />David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-70199681811720712612017-07-27T13:12:22.763+01:002017-07-27T13:12:22.763+01:00The OED gives some evidence.
The relevant subsect...The OED gives some evidence.<br /><br />The relevant subsection of the online article for <b>at</b> with geographical names is identical with the 1989 Second Edition. I don't know what the First Edition said.<br /><br />Anyway, the OED used to conclude from evidence to date that <b>at</b> was<br /><br /><b>2.</b>With proper names of places: particularly used of towns (with many exceptions, such as <i> London, New York</i>, etc.), and that in which the speaker lives (if of any size); (also) of small islands.<br /><br />Reading between the lines, i suspect that the editors were trying to fit the evidence into a pattern of <b>in</b> of <b>on</b> for bigger locations and <b>at</b> for smaller. In smaller type they offer a section of evidence<br /><br />Cf. <i>on</i> the Isle of Wight, <i>on</i> Ilnchkeity, <i>at</i> St. Helena, <i>at</i> Malta, <i>at</i> the English Lakes.<br /><br />I'm not impressed by the island evidence. I strongly suspect that the proliferation of texts with <i>at</i> St. Helena/Malta reflects a body of writing about them as <b>ships' destinations</b>. This is very much the case today when we refer to towns or cities as stops on a railway or air journey. <br /><br />[This is a point I made on this thread in 2015; it now appears lower down. I was a bit dogmatic insisting that we us <i>at</i> TOWN <b>only</b> in this way. This my gut instinct, but there would seem to be exceptions.]<br /><br />The small print Cf. continues<br /><br />Formerly used more widely: <i>at</i> Ireland, <i>at</i> London.<br /><br />This goes some way to answering your question. Except what does <i>formerly</i> mean? Before 1989, obviously, but did the First Edition also say <i>'formerly'</i>?<br /><br />More clearly, the OED must have considered <i><b>at</b> Brighton</i> as normal still in 1989.David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-22778164908551589512017-07-26T17:33:57.339+01:002017-07-26T17:33:57.339+01:00If you read books written in the late 19th/early 2...If you read books written in the late 19th/early 20th century (e.g. Sherlock Holmes, or early Agatha Christie), it's common to find that characters live "at" Brighton rather than "in" it. I don't know when this changed - does anybody? And whether there was an outcry and it was considered poor grammar....Mrs Redboots (Annabel Smyth)https://www.blogger.com/profile/11270027663691257254noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-85232831754571602302017-07-26T15:14:58.134+01:002017-07-26T15:14:58.134+01:00A very late addition, but this blog is clearly her...A very late addition, but this blog is clearly here for the ages...<br /><br />A thought about the British reluctance to drop "road", "street" etc. from an address - apart from the problem you mention about the same term preceding every synonym for "road" available - is that British roads (but not streets!) are often named after the town they would take you to if you followed them. There is a London Road in most towns in the south of England for example (and many within what is now Greater London). This presumably dates to a time when roads weren't formally named but people just said "take the London road" and it eventually became the official name. Many other roads (and streets) are named after landowners who were the Duke or Earl of some place or other. So a large proportion of the roads and streets in British towns bear the names of other towns or cities nearby, making the dropping of the final word a source of confusion.<br /><br />A final note on British postcodes, which I believe are among the most specific in the world. As I understand it, there will never be two addresses with the same number in the same postcode. So all you actually need on an envelope to get to the right address in the UK is: "House number 1, AB23 4CD".David Walter Hallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04629534099226234433noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-32120572813847435872016-02-03T22:52:48.515+00:002016-02-03T22:52:48.515+00:00This is an unhelpfully late contribution to this t...This is an unhelpfully late contribution to this topic but this difference has long interested me. I have read a lot of Harry Potter fanfic in my time, which (titter ye not) provides a lot of very interesting insights into the crossover of AmE and BrE usage: much of it is written by US-based authors who try to use the British idioms of the original books, often with mixed success. It is a dead giveaway when Harry, Ron, Hermione et al. talk of 'going to Diagon' rather than 'Diagon Alley' - I don't think many native Britons would ever say that!<br /><br />An American friend of mine once completely confused me by telling me that she would meet me 'at Liverpool' - Liverpool Street (Station). She'd been resident in the UK for some years by that point - clearly it's well ingrained.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-44118260658408917972015-10-08T16:20:01.349+01:002015-10-08T16:20:01.349+01:00Part 2:
The city of San Bernardino, California d...Part 2:<br /><br /><br />The city of San Bernardino, California does not control all of the area within its nominal boundaries. It has incorporated patches of the area surrounding its downtown in some manner understandable only to itself and Elbridge Gerry. In some cases, there will be an incorporated lot between two unincorporated lots. Which would be of interest only when paying taxes, except that incorporated areas have numbers based on the city grid while unincorporated areas have numbers based on the county grid. It's quite common to see a five-digit house number between two low-four-digit house numbers (though the street name stays the same). 1500 might be next door to 17420 (or whatever).<br /><br />Grid systems make quite a lot of sense in many ways, but time has shown that when there are many parallel streets and the traffic starts to increase, what used to be quiet, residential streets start to become thoroughfares. So more modern housing developments have started to go away from grids except for the arterial streets (often spaced 1 mile apart). The streets within such developments tend toward "twisty little passages, all alike" and death by grue is a constant danger. 8-)<br /><br />On section lines: Rural roads in the west tend to run along the lines between sections (nominally square-mile blocks of land). For east-west roads, this works pretty well, requiring deviation only when there's a difficult obstacle to progress, since lines of latitude are parallel. For north-south roads, though, things are a bit different, since lines of longitude converge as you head toward either pole. The result there is that you'll be driving along an arrow-straight road in the plains and for no apparent reason, the road will suddenly turn directly east or west for some distance, then resume its north-south direction.<br /><br />As to pronunciation, I typically use "zero" for "0" because it's unambiguous (the result of reading back many, many numbers over the telephone), though my intuition is that my practice is uncommon. When I suspect that I'm speaking for transcription, I normally read each digit separately ("two, nine, eight, one") rather than by pairs ("twenty-nine, eighty-one"), though the latter is more common in casual speech. For five-digit numbers, the same would apply, though the less formal would be "sixteen, four, fifty-four".Doug Sundsethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12416285410276713188noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-8512005131585816272015-10-08T16:19:44.032+01:002015-10-08T16:19:44.032+01:00Looks like I need two messages for length, so part...Looks like I need two messages for length, so part 1:<br /><br />Coming to this article (and comment thread) quite late, but I feel compelled to comment anyway. Perhaps it will be seen by some future reader.<br /><br />When younger, I spent some time working as a pizza store manager and pizza delivery driver in several western US cities and that experience led me to following numbering and addressing schemes in several more. So, some comments:<br /><br />Most of the western US (which might begin as far east as the original "West", in Pennsylvania) is laid out in grids, typically with address numbering in something like a Cartesian coordinate system around some origin. The most extreme version of this that I know of is that in Mormon-settled towns like Salt Lake City (mentioned upthread). In some places this is necessarily modified by topography or the railroad lines that came before the towns in many cases. For example, the old downtown area of Denver, Colorado, is aligned with the South Platte River and the rail lines that ran along it while the rest of the town is designed on a fairly strict grid. The interface between these two grid systems has resulted in quite a few five-pointed and three-pointed intersections that complicate traffic. Since this is in one of the higher-traffic areas of town, most of the streets are also one-way, which can make driving in downtown, especially near rush hour, quite annoying.<br /><br />It's pretty common to have numbered streets all running in the same direction in a metro area with named streets crossing them. In Denver, this is only for the east-west streets north of Ellsworth (the x-axis of the grid); south of Ellsworth, the east-west streets are also named. Long ago, the cities in the Denver metro area decided to go to a common grid numbering system, so 10401 N. Colorado is at the corner of 104th Ave. and Colorado Blvd., in Northglenn, 12001 N. Colorado is at the corner of 120th Ave. and Colorado Blvd. in Thornton, and 1401 N. Colorado is at the corner of 14th Ave. and Colorado Blvd. in Denver.<br /><br />I'll note that it is not possible to drive along Colorado from 104th St. to 14th St., though both sections are aligned on the grid, because of the S. Platte River valley intervening. This is actually standard in the metro area. My parents live on Girard Ave. (in a cul-de-sac). Girard Ave. runs east-west in fits and starts one block north of Hampden Ave. across many cities. Once you learn the grid (or at least the arterial roads and the numbering system), it's pretty simple to find a building from the address alone.<br /><br />On the other hand, Phoenix, Arizona has not had the same sort of cooperation between cities. The result is that, while the metro area is built on a grid, each city has its own numbering origin point and while some streets keep their names across city lines, others change them without notice. The result is that 1153 E. Baseline Rd. might be next to 2415 W. Baseline Rd. in a different city. (Baseline is a real street, but those numbers were chosen largely at random.) This makes finding anything from a pure street address difficult at times. The store you thought was a couple of miles away might well be 15 miles away across two other cities.<br /><br />In the farther west (particularly California, Oregon, and Washington), the old downtowns of often started off with numbered streets running one way and lettered streets running the other way, so the corner of 14th and F is a pretty common sort of thing to see. But alphabetical street naming doesn't have the same sort of extensibility as numbers do, so that quickly ended.<br />Doug Sundsethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12416285410276713188noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-81207268471514335962015-09-30T16:58:10.055+01:002015-09-30T16:58:10.055+01:00Since this article was first posted I've moved...Since this article was first posted I've moved to Glasgow, and as with so many things (not least that thing about British Reserve) the rules don't apply here.<br /><br />In the east end, for example, Cumbernauld Road plunges doggedly from Parkhead through Dennistoun, Carntyne, Riddrie and Millerston, swallowing other more direct roads in its path and getting numbered in the 1800s by the time it finally reaches the city boundary and passes into Stepps. (It continues as Cumbernauld Road from there through Muirhead and Moodiesburn too, though with the numbering reset).<br /><br />Over in the west those grand city centre thoroughfares Argyle Street and Sauchiehall Street finally meet by Kelvingrove Park, where both have reached numbers in four figures, and then become Dumbarton Road which is truly epic, getting close to 3000 by the western city boundary at Yoker. <br /> enitharmonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17829757748223670291noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-63026842887535653212015-07-27T21:33:41.393+01:002015-07-27T21:33:41.393+01:00About a dozen years ago the state of Vermont insta...About a dozen years ago the state of Vermont installed a new emergency response system that would automatically read out the address of the telephone to a dispatcher when someone called for police, fire, or ambulance services. This system would permit one to call 911 (our emergency number) without saying anything if partially incapacitated or running from a burning building. Of course this system required every house to have a number, something that was not very common in rural areas of the state. What Vermont did was to inventory every dwelling and assign a house number based on its location from the beginning of that road, to the thousandth of a mile. Our address, for example, is 338 Orchard Rd., which means we are .338 mile from the beginning of the road. An address of 1338 would be exactly one mile farther down the road. This system is very useful to everyone and also a great aid to emergency services when trying to find an address.<br /> Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-20747072996686807532015-07-10T22:57:52.184+01:002015-07-10T22:57:52.184+01:00FYI re: extended zip code.
We live in a small rura...FYI re: extended zip code.<br />We live in a small rural village in upstate New York.<br />Our 5-digit zip specifies the village; the 4-digit addition specifies the PO Box #.<br />So with only the 9-digit zip, mail reaches us directly.Jnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-8754699661816187952015-07-08T05:15:50.809+01:002015-07-08T05:15:50.809+01:00@ David Crosbie
What a lovely place to grow up --s...@ David Crosbie<br />What a lovely place to grow up --so much green space! <br /><br />Yep, I would call a "central reservation" a "median" or "median strip."<br /><br />Thank you!Diane Benjaminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02551747832953267346noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-76969960304811270532015-07-07T04:42:35.866+01:002015-07-07T04:42:35.866+01:00@Dru -- Oh, dear, this is what comes of me occasio...@Dru -- Oh, dear, this is what comes of me occasionally reading a rather eclectic (or downright weird) subject matter and of Blogger making me cut out a chunk of my original comment because I'd exceeded the character count. The long forgotten book or article I read this in (because I read it well over ten or fifteen years ago) was talking about how medieval towns grew up, and referred to some Roman general (no clue who at this late date) who lamented that you couldn't lay a town out with straight streets -- but there it was, it was indefensible if you did. That must have been downright depressing for a Roman, with their love of organization and order.....<br /><br />I wasn't thinking of modern towns at all, or anything after 1600 really. Maybe not even much after the high middle ages.<br /><br />I had some (not all) of that explained in my original comment, and had to cut it out. The internet foils us again, it's no substitute for face to face conversation. Drat it all anyway.Dark Star in the Morninghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04312003791405491874noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-44594966157507305882015-07-06T18:09:24.601+01:002015-07-06T18:09:24.601+01:00@Dark Star in the Morning and @naath, your point c...@Dark Star in the Morning and @naath, your point came up in conversation this weekend in a way that sheds light on the relative absence of similar street names in the US. During a long car ride, my 8-year-old nephew asked how streets got their names. His grandmother, who's a real estate broker, explained the process in which developers submitted their plans to the county planning board. "If any of the street names have been used before, the developer has to come up with new names." I believe that's a common bias through much of the US, which explains why it's rare to see a zillion slight variations of, say, Oxford. <br /><br />Atlanta's notorious indulgence of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peachtree_Street#cite_note-9" rel="nofollow">Peachtree</a> notwithstanding, my experience in driving around the US is that that planners will allow the same name for one or two offshoots of a road, but no more. So in the development where I lived as a teenager, one of cul-de-sacs off of Cape Ann Lane was called Cape Ann Court -- but the other one was Cherrystone Court. That pattern was repeated throughout the town: only one offshoot of a larger road would re-use the name, while the rest got names of their own. My sense is that in parts of the UK, names would get re-used until they wore out! Christian Johnsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17561529462675001889noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-2803949523066832762015-07-06T17:04:45.424+01:002015-07-06T17:04:45.424+01:00Though I am late to the game here, I could not let...Though I am late to the game here, I could not let comments about New York City's Borough of Queens go unanswered.<br /><br />Queens, like Manhattan, has a borough-wide grid. However, Queens's avenues run east-west and increase in number as you move south; and its streets run north-south and increase in number as you move east. In both the orientation of the avenues/streets and in the direction in which they increase, this is the opposite of Manhattan's grid.<br /><br />And the addresses are simply keyed to the nearest cross-road, a not-at-all-uncommon arrangement. So, an address on an avenue which lies between 59th and 60th Streets will be 59-02 or 59-37 or something; and an address on a street which lies between 34th and 35th Avenues will be 34-20 or 34-35 or something. The hyphen (usually called a "dash", somewhat inaccurately) is used only because the streets are numbered up to 271st St. and the avenues up to 165th Ave.; so the hyphen keeps straight which parts of the address are which. <br /><br />(It should be noted that the dash (again, really a hyphen) is used in some addresses in Brooklyn, and for the same reason. Flatlands Ave. runs east-west and crosses streets ranging in number from E.35th St. eastward to E.108th St. So address on Flatlands Ave. have the hyphen. Thus 81-15 is between E.81st and E.82nd Sts. The use of the hyphen continues even after the cross-streets cease to be numbered after E.108th St.; the pattern goes up to 126-xx.)<br /><br />Some large roads in Queens have names; but they will be treated by the grid as the numbered road which they replace. For example, Steinway St. sits where 39th St. would be. So addresses on crossing avenues between Steinway St. and 40th St. are 39-xx.<br /><br />There are a few exceptions to the Queens grid: <br /><br />* A few roads have a diagonal orientation, most notably Queens Blvd. and Metropolitan Ave. These are officially east-west, like avenues; so the addresses are keyed to the north-south Streets that they cross. However, both roads, being diagonal, will cross many Avenues. One must keep in mind that the addresses are dependent only on the crossing Streets, not on the crossing Avenues.<br /><br />* Some small sections of Queens have addresses that do not use the Queens grid. Some use ordinary addressing starting at 1; one section, Ridgewood, inexplicably uses addresses on its east-west roads ranging from 16-xx to 20-xx where 54-xx through 58-xx would be expected, and ordinary addresses starting from 1 on its north-south roads. The Rockaway penninsula has north-south Streets ranging in number from Beach 9th St. to Beach 227th St.; the address on the avenues are the typical Queens format (such as 63-19 between Beach 63rd and Beach 64th St., etc.), but they increase as you go west, rather than as you go east. And addresses on the Streets themselves are ordinary numbers beginning with 1.<br /><br />* Where there is a large space between consecutive numbers either of Streets or Avenues, intermediate suffixes are used. The most common for Streets is Place; so 210th Place sits between 210th and 211th Streets. The most common for Avenues is Road; so 85th Road sits between 85th and 86th Avenues. There are further intermediate suffixes for Streets (such as Lane) and for Avenues (such as Drive).<br /><br />Despite those aforementioned situations, navigating in Queens is almost as easy as it is in Manhattan. The only places where it can get confusing is where the number of the Street and the number of the Avenue are similar, so you can have 48th St. crossing 48th Ave. And, if such a place also has a plethora of the intermediate suffixes, you can have not only 60th St. crossing 60th Ave., but also 60th Lane crossing 60th Drive.Ferdinand Cesaranohttp://facebook.com/FerdinandCesaranonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-23597027926127839322015-07-06T13:48:12.836+01:002015-07-06T13:48:12.836+01:00This link should take you to the British Library a...<a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item103694.html" rel="nofollow">This link</a> should take you to the British Library account of Christopher Wren's proposal for a (largely) grid plan for London to be newly built after it was razed to the ground by the Great Fire of 1666.<br /><br />It was never a starter. Everybody who owned land and property insisted on the exact location and size in the new London, and wouldn't yield a square inch toward any more rational layout.David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-20729118586335116492015-07-06T13:48:04.376+01:002015-07-06T13:48:04.376+01:00This comment has been removed by the author.David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-2232998364931323132015-07-06T13:46:26.343+01:002015-07-06T13:46:26.343+01:00This comment has been removed by the author.David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28787909.post-7217887658569337672015-07-06T13:36:03.898+01:002015-07-06T13:36:03.898+01:00Dru
Sorry I didn't spot what my spellchecker ...Dru<br /><br />Sorry I didn't spot what my spellchecker was doing to your name!David Crosbiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01858358459416955921noreply@blogger.com