Someone has gone to the trouble to analyze the street suffixes of six major cities and rank the preponderance of "streets" versus "avenues," "boulevards," "courts," and outlying no-suffixers like Broadway in New York. According to the findings of data scientist (and Portlander) Seth Kadish, Chicago, for instance, has more avenues than New York, which has more of them than San Francisco. As far as less common endings go, SF is fond of terraces, but likes courts, drives, and places even more. Kadish doesn't draw any conclusions from his findings, but if street endings have anything close to the psychological significance of function words—which have been found by linguists to predict dating success—we might really hit it off with Philadelphia. [CityLab; NPR]
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