- ADVERTISEMENT - And yet people from elsewhere find this funny, curious, quizzical or maddening, depending on your boiling point regarding what you may consider the ill-advised usage of definite articles. Most recently, the parents of the Post’s managing editor, down from Northern California to help her move to Naples from the squalor of Signal Hill, asked her to force me to write a column about why we always use “the” with freeway names, or maybe we’d be happier working elsewhere. The shortest answer is we Southern Californians pretty much invented freeways and so we can call them whatever we want.