David Nebenzahl wrote:

On 1/21/2011 5:43 PM Arfa Daily spake thus:

He was in sunny Caffy-lornia ... Costa Mesa in Orange County, a few miles
down the Interstate from LA

OK, Arf, a small lesson in regional US dialects, free of charge:

Nobody here in "Cal-ee-fonia", as our recently departed
Governator/Gropenator called it, calls them "interstates", even though
they are, in fact, interstate highways. Some folks back east may call
them that, though I'm not sure (I've heard them referred to as
"turnpikes" in some places). One wonders whether some LA residents even
know what an "interstate" is ...

In any case, just in case you actually visit Caleefonia sometime in the
near future, you should also be aware of an important difference in
usage between SoCal (basically El-Lay and environs) and NoCal (San
Francisco and thereabouts). Down there, they don't use *any* noun for a
road (highway, interstate, etc.), but they do use articles with the road
number, as in "the 405", "the 101", etc.

But bewa up here in the Beige Area, where we like to think we're so
much superior to our SoCal cousins, we never use the article, saying
instead "take 80 to get to Berkeley" or "take 101 to 280 to 17 to get
down to Santa Cruz". (One can easily spot newcomers to San Francisco who
refer to "the 80" or "the 101". That's just SO wrong!)


The midwest and southeast do call them either Interstate or
abbreviate it to 'I'. This is a good thing, since they run a thousand
miles or more. In fact, I lived about 15 miles from I-75 in Ohio. It's
about the same distance from me, in Florida. I can't recall anyone not
using this terminology in the 20+ years I've lived here, or the 30 +
years I lived in Ohio. The only place I've been with no Interstate
Highway was in Alaska. Everywhere else, they used the same terminology.


--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.