Local Transportation Terminology

When I was but two weeks into 18, I moved to Portland, Oregon.  On the ride from the airport, I got talking with a friendly taxi driver who gave me a few tips on how to blend in linguistically.

"First of all is the river. It rhymes with 'damn it!' as in 'Willamette, damn it!' And there's a street downtown. It's spelled C-O-U-C-H, but pronounced 'kooch',"

Of course, this is not unique to Portland. Every inhabited city, village and mountain valley on the earth has its own vocabulary.  Among urban dwellers, it seems that transportation is a fertile subject for hyper-local naming schemes.  Chicago has its "L," and Londoners ride their "Tube." "The 90" is an Interstate Highway in Los Angeles and a bus route here in Cincinnati.

One way to get a quick sample of the local language of transportation is to listen to the rush hour traffic reports for any given city.  In Cincinnati you will hear the terms "Cut-in-the-hill" and "The GE merge" used with the assumption that everyone knows exactly where they are.  One stretch of US Highway 50 is so well known for accidents it is simply referred to as "Dead Man's Curve."

Why? I suggest that most people will spend most of their lives communicating principally with people in their local vicinity.  Since one (although by no means the only) principal functions of language is to communicate information quickly and concisely, the way we speak assumes local knowledge more often than not.