“Road” is a word that speaks of black-tarmac-covered, or rough muddy or dusty, surfaces, along which vehicles speed or crawl, of quests and journeys (Kerouac’s “On The Road”), of musicians on tour, and – metaphorically - of progress (a patient, after medical treatment, on “the road to recovery”), or its opposite (a compulsive gambler “on the road to ruin”). Whether you’re in a Lane, an Avenue, or a Close, the part where wheels pass on their way from A to B, where children shouldn’t cross on their own, is the “road”.
The name of a road gives us a clue to its character or nature: we would expect Glubton Road to be the road which leads into and out of Glubton, Glubton Avenue to have trees along each side, Glubton Lane to be narrow, and maybe winding (although it may have grown wider and straighter over the years). Glubton Close is a dead end – it leads nowhere, Glubton Crescent turns off a bigger road, turns a semi-circle and comes back onto the same road, and Glubton Gardens will be in a residential area.
Glubton Street, we can be sure, has houses and/or shops along it. Its name also has one mysterious and fascinating difference from the others, although you can look and look and you will never see it…
A “street” is a paved passage (from the Latin via strata) where people, not necessarily on their way from somewhere to somewhere else, can do stuff: go shopping, meet other people, have a haircut, visit friends. The word “street” is associated not with travel, but with human social and commercial activity. It’s a place, associated with where you are, or live, or struggle to live, rather than where you're going: if a film, or a DIY problem, is exactly the sort of thing you like, or know about, you localize its appropriateness by saying “it’s right up my street.” If you win the lottery you will be “living on easy street;” if you don’t, your financial crisis might be characterized as being (for partly obscure historical reasons unconnected with sexuality) “in Queer Street”. Someone who is “on the street(s)” is either homeless or working as a prostitute (street-walker).
Our phrase in English for an ordinary, non-expert person, whose opinions might be representative of the general population, is “the man in the street”. (By contrast, “the man in the road” is either digging it up to repair the water-pipes, or the victim of a car accident). Conservative America characterizes the traditional values and interests of ordinary people and small-business-owners in the real and metaphorical name Main Street; liberal Americans associate the same expression with mediocrity and small-town materialism. “The high street” in British English is where mainstream shops and services serve the conventional needs of the inhabitants of a town or city.
But “street” has also become associated over the last half-century with many human characteristics associated with urban environments: A “streetwise” person is alert, worldly, maybe cynical, and –to refer back to our very first Word of the Week – smart, in the sense of "sharp". In fact the noun “street smarts” describes the similar set of skills you need to survive and flourish in the big, bad city.
“Street” as a type of adjective or noun-modifier (adjunct) is a synonym for popular, spontaneous youth culture. “Street fashion” describes the trends that evolve in the way young, counter-cultural urbanites dress, which more grown-up “high street fashion” – the clothes sold by mainstream commercial chains – desperately tries to keep up with, as contemporary artists might be interested in the energy and immediacy of non-academic “street art”, and so on.
Now, I mentioned before that, in terms of nomenclature,“street” has one, invisible peculiarity. It is this: when we say 2-word proper nouns, or names, we generally place the main stress, or accent, on the second word. Under normal circumstances*, we will say James Bond, Jenifer Lopez, Prince Charles, Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, the Starship Enterprise, Latin America, Mary Magdalen and Apple Mac.
This in contrast to most 2-word compound nouns, where the first noun (or gerund) qualifies the second: in these, the stress usually falls on the first word: car keys, washing machine, shoe shop, internet provider. (“Who cares?” you might be thinking: “What difference does it make which word I stress?” Well, change the stress, and you risk changing the meaning: Pay good money for the services of an English teacher, and you may find that she’s a woman from Leeds who teaches yoga, while your English teacher could be from Ouagadougou, but will definitely be able to help you with your phrasal verbs).
Now, Fifth Avenue, Drury Lane, Mornington Crescent, Oxford Circus, Charing Cross Road, Leicester Square, and even Route 66, follow the 2-word proper noun rule: the stress is on the last word. This applies to pretty much every road name, whether it’s an Avenue, a Mews, a Passage; anything, in fact, EXCEPT…
Street!
Bond Street, Oxford Street, Carnaby Street, Quality Street, Wall Street, Sesame Street : they all follow the compound-noun stress pattern: stress on the first word.
Why is this? I have no idea, and neither, it seems, have most language experts. The rhythmic distinctiveness of “street” might be connected to the fact that names with “Street” entered the English language much earlier than most of these other designations. In fact, it seems that in the middle ages “road” was an abstract word, describing a traveller’s direction – the actual physical road was then described generically as... a Street – which is why there is an important, very long, un-street-like, Roman road in Southern England called Watling Street.
I shall continue to research into this conundrum, and let you know if I discover anything, as this sort of mystery is right up my street…
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