posted 2007/09/25 at 23:24
Heading up to campus to teach kind of brings back memories. I basically take the same highway up from Toledo that my folks would take back when we were visiting my grandparents, and when I head up to Ann Arbor to play dancey games (like I did tonight) I go even further on that route. The first few times I made these drives I was more concerned with keeping my eyes on the road -- Michigan's highways are kind of crazy compared to Ohio's (particularly their nearly-stop-on-a-dime-after-going-70 exit ramps) -- but now that I've gotten the route down, I'm examining the scenery a bit more, and remembering how I used to pass these places when I was younger. As a child I wished I could visit some of these places, but now that I can actually stop at these places, of course now I don't really have much time to visit most of them. (Joe, what's the name of that mall just off of the State Street exit on I-94?)
Driving in Michigan as much as I have been lately has also made me more aware of how traffic signs are changing. In Michigan they still use the old square-type exit markers, which I prefer aesthetically, while in Ohio they're changing to a more vertical style. The new signs are smaller, which doesn't make much sense to me because I doubt they're saving that much money on the smaller signs, plus the numbers on the new signs are much smaller than they were before, which I'm assuming makes it harder for those with poor eyesight to discern. Another strange thing that's happening is that Ohio is adding exit numbers to a lot of exits that previously didn't have numbers; as an example, after I-475 and US-23 branch off from each other (just a third of a mile from my house), there's only one exit before you get to the Michigan border, and it used to be that this exit had no number. Now all of a sudden it's Exit 234. I'm assuming that this is to make it easier for people who download driving directions off of the Internet, but it's still weirdly jarring.
While I'm at it, I'd like to bring up the fact that I actually learned a lot of my first words from highway signs, while my folks were driving me around. (For some reason being driven seemed to stimulate my brain; I can remember back when I was still in my early years of grade school asking my father if the mile markers marked how long the road had gone, or how many miles straight we were from the state border.) I mention this because, for all the talk these days about how "leet speak" and the like are ruining our grammar, I can remember that when I was a kid, coming back down from Michigan to "our exit" from the highway (an exit-only lane), there was a big yellow sign above the lane about a half-mile before the exit that read, "THRU TRAFFIC MERGE LEFT." If "through" hasn't been killed by that, and by drive-thru and all the other uses of "thru," I don't think we need to worry too much about Internet lingo "ruining" our language permanently.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon