Discussion: Best ever map legend?

Argh! My brain hurts.

Just... why?

Just...NO!

At first glance this seemed pretty bad. Then I looked at it again and I realized it was amazing.

As we geeks used to say:
Warum soll man es einfach machen - wenn man es schön kompliseren kan!

This is weapons-grade trolling. I love it.

It's simple enough that I personally find it really funny instead of infuriating. I mean, it's it really funny because it's REAL -- no?

While you're thinking about that legend, what does everyone think about this phone number?

Great for craigslist

You're much to young to have experienced this, but that's what phone numbers in the US all used to look like. My grandmother's phone number was PL6-3438. Those first two letters were typically given as a word, so her number would be said as "PLeasant 6-3438". The jazz standard "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" refers to the phone number of the hotel where the Glenn Miller Orchestra used to play. So the townhomes are at 483-5066, which would have been said as "IVanhoe 3-5066", although HUdson or HUnter or something would have been a more likely word.

(I will say that I have a weird feeling that there's something here that I'm missing. And I have no idea why someone would present a phone number like that these days.)

My parent's number was EDison 9-9262. This was in Bloomington, Indiana. If someone was in the same exchange, you only had to dial the last 5 numbers.
Early on we had a party line; multiple people were on the same connection and your phone would ring differently for each person on the line. You could pick up the phone and here a conversation in a different house.

To further what J-J was talking about, Ivanoe or Pennsylvania in this context was called the exchange. I think that may have corresponded to a physical piece of switching equipment, through which all the Ivanoe lines joined the (physical, wired) telephone network. It would make sense that all the Ivanoe exchanges' endpoints were clustered together.

You move your house, you get a different phone number.

Maybe, (stretching here), the use of IV3 as an exchange is an attempt to be friendly to those people suffering from age-related memory problems like Alzheimers.

I will say I looked at Google street view to see if the town homes were ivy covered. (They're not.)

I actually looked up to see if maybe it was an over 55 community or something, with the number like that for nostalgia. But it doesn't appear to be so.

My grandmother had a party line until only a few years ago. I think there was finally nobody else left who wanted to be on it with her. As a small child I didn't understand that there were different ring patterns and it confused me when the phone would ring and she would say "It's not for us." I thought my grandmother was a bit psychic.

IV would not have been an exhange. At least in Canada they never used the letters I or O in an exchange name. The reasons should be obvious.
Has anyone tried dialing the number? Or the number if you treated those letters as roman numerals?

IV is the "Ivanhoe" exchange. I grew up with a "Victor" number.

Sometimes using I or O was unavoidable. What do you do when the exchange is 64 or 56?

TI dewater 4- 10 0 9
Thank you Chuck Berry, from "The Promised Land"

Hello. Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?

My home number was MI9-0303. MI for Mitchell.

Has anyone tried dialing the number? Or the number if you treated those letters as roman numerals?

As J-J said, IV3 translates to 483. A search for the Colonial Village Town Homes (area code 215 indicates a location near Philadelphia) yields web results with the number listed as 483.

Someone should call them to ask why "IV" and end the mystery, though it's more fun to speculate. ;-) Maybe it's the owner or manager's initials.

867-5309... ask for Jenny.

Here's a game: what could Jenny's exchange name be? 86 would be TUV and MNO; throwing out the impossible (in English) combinations leaves TO, UM, UN, and VO.
Tmesis is the only word I could find that starts with TM (the separation of parts of a compound word by an intervening word or words, heard mainly in informal speech) so I think that's not likely to work.

But Jenny is now Ed

Jenny isn't really Ed. He tried to get that, but failed, but Alex used the number as a placeholder for him.

The standard exchange words that Wikipedia lists for 86 are TOwnsend, UNderhill, UNion, UNiversity, VOlunteer. I grew up in Townsend, but our exchange was 59. (and we had such a primitive phone system that you only needed to dial four digits for an in-town call, provided the first of the four was a 2 or an 8. If it was a 6, then you had to dial five digits).

TOronto, obviously.

@Janet - If you took I and V as Roman numerals, you'd get 1-5-3. Exchanges never started with "1", so that's probably out.

Remember the old prank of telling someone that there was a Jokes hotline that always had a new joke of the day? The number was NNN (pick a local exchange) - JOKZ. If they weren't very bright, they'd dial 6 digits, then there'd be a long pause while they realiZed that there was no "Z" on old rotary dial phones - and the joke was on them...

"I" is under the 4 on a keypad, "V" is under the 8. I wasn't thinking of the Roman Numeral transliteration.

The number is definitely 215-483-5066, you can look it up (as Janet did). But that doesn't answer the question of why. Unless they're trying to exclude people under a certain age.

We always thought using letters on phones was a strange American custom, although they've started to creep into commercial use in Australia in the last couple of decades. (Using 1300 TSUNAMI as our tsunami warning information line was fairly short-lived once it was realised that hardly anyone could spell it).

My Google Voice number, as reported to me by a friend, is HUGH-TEN-MAC. Even I find that harder to remember than the numbers.

Beechwood 4-5789

I won't share the code here but the combination on the lock to obtain the key for our orienteering shed is denoted by a particular orienteering word, except the lock itself is defined by numbers and unless you remember the numbers pertaining to each letter on a phone, you kind of need your phone to help decipher it (or else just remember the numerical combination instead).

I've heard that as phone numbers lengthened, "they" felt that memorizing 7 numbers would be too difficult hence, ST(ate)6-7387 -- makes sense to me.
So in our lifetime in US, we've gone from memorizing 5 numbers to memorizing 10 numbers [314-555-1212] to "Why bother memorizing any phone numbers?" Even knowing your own is hardly needed except for filling out forms.

CApital 6-2929

I just found out that the state capital is where you'll find the state capitol (weird; I had thought both were "capitol")

I always remember that capitOl is the building because most of the capitol buildings have a rotunda which is round like an O. (At least in my case, the state and US capitol buildings both do.)