"Road," "Street," "Avenue" And "Lane"

Stupid Question ™
Dec. 26, 2002
By John Ruch
© 2002

Q: What is the difference between a road, a street, an avenue and a lane?
—Ronn L. Rickett


A: Not much today, especially in the suburbs and industrial parks where most new streets are built and named with maximum cutey-pie-ness.

But historically, these are all significantly distinct terms.

“Street” has seniority. It’s straight from Old English stræt, which goes back to a Germanic adoption of Late Latin strata, the term for those great paved roads that all led to Rome. (Strata is the past participle of sternere, meaning to “level” or “pave,” and is related to our geological term “strata,” meaning a layer of rock.)

By about AD 1000, “street” referred specifically to wide paths in towns, as opposed to alleys.

“Road” has traveled a stranger path. An Old English word, it sprang from the same Germanic roots as “ride” and originally meant “to ride on horseback” or a trip made that way.

Around 900 we find it used specifically to refer to an attack conducted on horseback—what we now call, after a Scottish twist on pronunciation, a “raid.”

In Middle English, the meaning generalized to refer to sea journeys. But it was only in the late 1500s that it suddenly showed up in the modern meaning of a wide, land-based path, not the trip you make on one.

Why this happened is unclear. The “Oxford English Dictionary” notes that the equivalent term in other Germanic languages underwent a similar meaning shift. It also suggests the influence of such Old English terms as hweolrad (“wheel-track”).

“Avenue” is straight French for “approach,” from Old French advenir (“to come to”). Fittingly for a French word, it implies quality.

It entered English around 1600 as a generic term for any sort of passageway, though it particularly applied to entryways and exits and was especially a military term.

But around 1650, the English began using it specifically to refer to the long, fancy and typically tree-lined roads leading up to country estates. It continues to imply a grand, wide roadway, especially following the impressive avenues of Paris constructed in the 1870s.

Despite such particulars, “street,” “road” and “avenue” have also been used generically and metaphorically over the centuries.

“Lane,” on the other hand, has had a relatively restricted meaning from the start. It’s pretty much unchanged from its Germanic roots and has always meant a narrow passage between houses or natural obstacles. Even its later, generic usages retain the sense of narrowness, such as shipping lanes, or the traffic lanes we now paint onto roads, streets and avenues.

For clarity, old-time city planning sometimes dictated the use of these terms. For example, Manhattan’s north-south roads are “avenues,” while the east-west roads are “streets.” Today, planners tend to focus more on the “given” name and consider “road,” “street,” “avenue” and “lane” as synonymous.

Train Engines Backward/"Flea Markets"

Stupid Question ™
Jan. 17, 2002
By John Ruch
© 2002

Q: When a train is being pulled by two or more engines, why is one engine always facing backward?
—Anonymous


A: Train engines can reach the same speed and pulling power whether they run forward or backward.

The lead engine must face forward so the headlight, cowcatcher and similar essentials are out front. But it doesn’t matter which direction any additional engines are pointing.

And so, railyard crews usually don’t go to the trouble of turning them all the right way around. Instead, they attach the engines in whichever direction they happen to be pointing on the yard.

“They don’t make any effort to put them in any order,” said John Bromley, a spokesperson for Union Pacific in Omaha.

It’s not true that one engine will always be facing backward, but it happens that way often enough. For one thing, an engine that comes into the yard will usually be facing “backward” relative to a return trip (presuming it’s heading back more or less the way it came). If nobody bothers to turn it around, it will remain “backward.”

Bromley said that in the Rocky Mountains, trains often run with extra engines in the middle and at the end of the train, both for extra power and for better handling and stability. He said that in this configuration, the engine at the end is often put on facing backward. This is so that the train, once it reaches its destination, can immediately go back the way it came without having to turn the engine around.

* * * * *

Following my Jan. 3 column on the origin of the term “flea market,” a reader wrote in with an unusual alternative.

I explained that the term is a direct translation from French, and was coined in 1800s Paris as a joking reference to garbage peddlers.

But reader Gwen wrote that a tour guide at Vienna’s Schoenbrunn Palace had shown her a painting of a monkey in a marketplace picking fleas off people for money—and said this historical practice was the origin of “flea market.”

Susanne Gruber-Hauk at the Schoenbrunn confirmed that the palace indeed has such an image—actually a tapestry.

But she quickly backed off from the “flea market” origin claim. In fact, the Schoenbrunn has no historical or linguistic evidence for it. They simply have a cute story based on what they think the tapestry depicts.

And I’m not sure it depicts what they think. The tapestry is Flemish, and the scene on it designed by the painter David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690).

Teniers put monkeys in several of his paintings. Like many artists of his era, he typically used them to symbolize human foolishness and vice. It seems likely that the tapestry is some sort of social satire, not a historical or documentary scene.

Of course, even if there were such monkeys, there’s still nothing linking them to a French phrase of 200 years later. There’s just the pat folklore that is all too commonly spread by historical site tour guides.