INTRODUCTION: The United States Postal Service divides addresses into seven possible parts: “primary address number, predirectional, street name, suffix, postdirectional, secondary address indentifier, and secondary address.” The USPS recognizes 206 distinct suffixes, ranging from the traditional “street,” “road” and “way” to the less traditional “loaf” and “shoal” to the compound, “stravenue” (street and avenue).
OBJECTIVE: We hope to gain insight into prevailing and past views of domestic ideals by quantifying and understanding trends in street naming, particularly suffix use.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: The goal is to obtain cross-sections of suffix use at several different time points and to compare changes of proportions from decade to decade. Once a geographic locale is fixed (preferably one that has a mix of early, mid- and current suburban development), we would need access to atlases (or lists) containing street name data in one easy-to-tabulate location. Depending on the source form, gathering data may be labor intensive – electronic data is preferable.
DISCUSSION: We suspect that early data would show a predominance of certain street suffixes (i.e. street, avenue and road) versus later data, which we would expect to see a lower incidence of these suffixes and a wider variety generally.
Follow Takery on Twitter
Takery (our editor-in-chief) has obtained a Twitter account. He’ll be uploading/updating his whereabouts at a surprisingly frequent rate. If you ever want to know what a giant half-rabbit/half-human entrepreneur/baker/banker is doing at any given moment, this is clearly your best option.
http://www.twitter.com/theREALtakery
We’ve been having a problem with fake Twitter accounts. You know this is the real account because it has “REAL” in its name.
We are busy working on our next issue. It will probably be based in miscellany (i.e. not “lost arts”).
We have also re-committed to updating the website regularly with posts, snippets and convolutes. They are not blogs. Dairy River is not a blog. As you already know, DR is not a dairy.
So I’m glad we’re on the same page.