The two I remember were:
(1) If someone tells you they are going to “the city,” where are they going?
(2) Name a freeway.
The other TAs and I compiled the results. For (1), the northern Californians almost always answered “to San Francisco,” while the southern Californians gave a variety of answers, including “Huh?” For (2), the northerners gave a number, like “the 101,” while the southerners usually answered with a name, like “the Golden State” or “the Harbor Freeway.” (I haven’t been to California for a while, but my impression is that SoCal usage has shifted since the 1970s to numbers, too.)
The instructor of that class was Marc Okrand, who later created the Klingon language.
https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-5-the-101-the-405-why...
IIRC, in the Bay Area, they don't put 'the' before freeway names or numbers. We certainly do not here in Oregon. It's a dead giveaway that someone is from CA.
They definitely do. Sometimes I do (30 years in norcal and 3 years in socal).
Edit: oh and "The City" === san Francisco drove me nuts, too.
Post-2000, SoCal usage is usually with the definite article: "the 101 or the 5" NorCal is usually with no article: "101 or I-5". The SoCal pattern is rooted in the named freeway usages of earlier decades, but while the style of traffic reporting may still use "the Golden State freeway", popular usage became terser over time, leading to "the 5". The entire topic and regional differences can easily produce animated discussions, both in-person, and online.
I always assumed that that skit was a great exaggeration. But last winter I cycled from LAX across Southern California to Mexico, and the local people I chatted with really were like that. “I love doing activity X or eating food Y, so sometimes I’ll take the [interstate number] to [place] and get off at [street name].” No one really grasped that as a foreigner on a bike, all those numbers were incomprehensible to me.
Those skits aren't about the number, they're about the word "the."
Elsewhere in the country, where the freeways were built later and didn't have as many old established pre-number names, people talk like "Take 75 and then go west on 285 to [whatever exit]. And surface street names, SoCal or elsewhere, rarely have "the" anywhere (nobody would say "go to The Sunset Avenue"); it's a specific history-of-freeways-in-Socal thing.
A foreigner not knowing local street names seems completely unrelated to numbers-vs-word-names or "the".
It 100% has. When I read "name a freeway," the first thing that popped into my head was the 5...
This gave me an ear for accents. It was a game of mine to guess where someone was from. It was challenging because the subject almost invariably had lived in different regions and had picked up bits and pieces of a few accents, and whose parents likely had yet another set of accents.
I became pretty good at it, particularly with Southern accents (partly due to living in the South and Southerners enlisting at significantly higher rates than the rest of the country).
I could pick out someone from Dallas vs Charleston vs Upstate South Carolina vs LA and more.
But the next generation has lost a lot of accent distinctiveness, particularly amongst the middle to upper middle classes, so my powers are fading.
(Side note: in True Detective they describe Matthew McConaughey's character as Texan and make it a plot point that he's an outsider in Louisiana--and he does indeed have one of the Texas accents--but Woody Harrelson also has a pretty distinctively Texan accent)
Do you think that affected educational quality in any way? Like did kids fall behind in class because they moved around so often?
Kids were generally well behaved so there wasn't much in the way of disruption. Everyone has at least one parent (usually dad) in the military and I seem to recall serious behaviors like bullying could impact military careers, so there was an incentive to have some minimal level of concern about children. Incomes were relatively equal, and at the time (and probably now) racism and the like was not tolerated by anyone.
Everyone moved a lot so the awkwardness of a new school system was significantly reduced; pretty much everyone had been the new kid at some point.
If you were overseas (likely if you're in DoDDS schools) there'd likely be some sort of weekly local language and culture class that was mandatory. My school also offered full language immersion as an option.
There aren't many studies on military brats, unfortunately. I've seen a few that suggest higher college graduation rates than the general population, but a greater likelihood of starting or finishing a degree at some point other than directly after high school. More worldliness.
I'd wager that there'd be a difference on a few variables between children that stayed Stateside at one location (e.g. grew up in Norfolk around the naval base and stayed in the area), children who were stationed overseas and attended military schools, children who moved around the US and didn't attend military schools, and some combination thereof. Throw in peace and war as variables.
I can attest that moving from random US district to another with a different curriculum does make you both ahead of and behind the curve. I had to retake a number of classes I'd had in middle and elementary school to meet high school graduation requirements for the Nth new high school.
I was once ahead in math then behind due to differences in sequences.
I'm sure it impacted which colleges accepted me.
I've heard some post-9/11 changes may have helped with transfers but that wasn't my era, unfortunately.