The highway.
The slow way.
The medium sized way.
When we get in the car to go someplace, sometimes we have to get on the highway. If you want to be precise about it, it’s the parkway, as opposed to the Expressway or the Thruway (which ought to be the Dew Way, because after all it’s really the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, and spelling it “thru” is an abomination, but I digress). Anyway, I call it the highway.
One day, Miss M. chirped up after I’d gotten off the highway and said “now we’re on the slow way?” Sure kid, local roads are slow, therefore “slow way” works for me.
Last week, we went to visit my mother. At some point, we were off the highway and the child was perturbed that I wasn’t going faster, stuck as I was behind a large yellow truck. Finally, the truck turned off, leaving the road in front of me free and clear. She encouraged me to speed up. I said “No, I really can’t, it’s not that kind of a road”, because it wasn’t.
Says she, “I wish we were on the medium-sized way. “
What slays me about this whole naming of roads is that she’s allocated three different measurement schemes to her one classification of the road system, mixing metaphors if you will.
Poetic license at age four? Because keeping all the measurements consistent is so boring:
Fast Way – Slow Way
Large Way – Medium Sized Way – Small Way
What do you call the opposite of the highway?
23 comments:
I don't know. I'm sort of confused now. Maybe the opposite of the highway is the sober way? Oh no, nevermind. Don't tell her that.
The Merritt? The no way.
95? The death trap.
Aren't I just a barrel of fun tonight?
I'm boring - the interstate highway is the highway, state roads/highways are secondary roads, and everything else is a tertiary road.
Yawn...
Shade and Sweetwater,
K
We go for highways (or Big Roads), and small roads. Not sure what's in between, but I'll pay more attention to this the next time we take a road trip!
the driveway?
A road.
My way.
Her in California we're all about the freeway and the side road.
This is profound. I love words with no opposite. When I was around that age I started accusing my mom of taking "long cuts" (which she claimed were shortcuts, of course) when driving.
In California we are the freeway and the toll road..ugh. Both suck.
We have freeways...
Lets see her get her little head around that one. Maybe she will pay you to take her places?
My daughter has taken to shouting, "Faster! Go faster!" from the back seat. We don't even watch Nascar...
We use the highway for major highways, the expressway for the smaller ones around home and, um, I don't think we can the regular road anything. The street? The roadway?
a driveway, of course.
makes no sense, I know.
When I moved to Los Angeles people laughed when I called freeways "expressways"
The low road?
Here, the non-highway is called the feeder. What sort of sense does that make? Texans are crazy.
Red lights and stop signs? I'm at a loss. Her system makes sense.
Dirt road. Lots of 'em. And some morons still think they can go 60mph on 'em.
I like that kid!
No answer, just another nod of admiration for the thinking.
i always thought parkway was an apt name for those bits where the traffic clogs up and you're actually parking there on the freeway(that's a rather california word for it, isn't it?). :-) in danish, it's the motor way. :-) i'm rambling. need coffee.
We're lucky, we can walk most places from our home -- to school, to the grocery store, to Starbucks, to the doctors, to French class.
So when we do go somewhere (like London) drive on the Motorway.
My children are quite boring. We use the word freeway and all my kids want me to do is "get there faster!"
My kids encourage me to go fast on any road - big or small! Highway or not!
We call them freeways or highways!
Fortunately I can avoid them most of the time!
(popped over from Under the Big Blue Sky)
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