Cultural and linguistic details
Yes, I do have other things I ought to be doing, and I'm gonna go do some of 'em just as soon as I post this one last thought for tonight. (I suppose I could save this and turn it into another "Words & Stuff" column for Flytrap next year, if Tim & Heather want one, but I'm not patient enough to wait for that.)
I was reading a published story the other day that was set in the San Francisco Bay Area. And all of the people in the story kept referring to the local freeways with a the in front of the numbers: "the 101," "the 280," "the 85."
On checking the author's bio, I was not at all surprised to discover that the author lives in Southern California. (Okay, I was a little surprised, but only because I had misread the author's name at first and initially thought it was by someone else who I know lives in Northern California. But that's beside the point.) The thing is, most Southern Californians use "the" with freeway numbers ("the 5," "the 405"), but I don't know any Northern Californians (other than those who've spent a significant amount of time in SoCal) who do that. We just call the local freeways "101" and "280" and "85" and so on. If you hear someone refer to driving on "the 5," you can be pretty certain that they either live or have lived in SoCal; up here we're more likely to say "5" or "I-5."
It's a tiny point; it's something that nobody who doesn't live in the Bay Area would probably notice or care about. (Much like the fact that almost nobody who grew up around here calls San Francisco Frisco. Though it wouldn't surprise me if Frisco were to go through the same kind of generational reclaiming that sci-fi is undergoing.) (Another example of local phrasing differences, of course, is the whole pop vs soda thing.) And it struck me that if such a tiny point of phrasing can trip up people who live only a few hundred miles away, it's a wonder that anyone ever manages to write anything even remotely convincingly from the point of view of someone from another culture.
I see this kind of phrasing issue all the time, of course, in editing—authors often write phrases that I've never heard before, or unfamiliar usages of familiar words, and I'm never sure whether the phrase or usage in question is a common one where the author is from. (Or where the author is writing about.) This is particularly common with Britishisms—I want stories by British authors to retain their British, um, flavour, but sometimes I don't know whether a given phrase is a Britishism, or a more local phrase, or idiosyncratic to the author, or just a mistake.
It's not that big a deal; I query the author, they either say it's intentional (and we leave it alone) or they change it. And either way I try to file the phrase away in my memory in case I should encounter it again.
Still, it seems tough to get this stuff right. But I guess this is another case where it's better to try and fail than not to try, where the attempt is an imperfect process yielding imperfect results, a goal to strive for even if you don't quite achieve it.
