Whenever I travel back to the United States of America, now, I find myself picking up on cultural curiosities that had previously gone unnoticed. On my most recent trip back to the United States (for my grandmother's funeral), I was particularly struck by the use of the abbreviation "St."

Have you ever noticed how inconsistent Americans can be with this two-letter combination? Particularly on road signs, "St" can sometimes mean "State," sometimes "Street," and sometimes "Saint." You could conceivably write out short-hand directions to the capitol building in downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota, by saying "Take Rice St to the St Capitol in St Paul." That is: "Take Rice St(reet) to the St(ate) Capitol in S(ain)t Paul." Weird, huh

It's also interesting to see how thoroughfares, in general, are abbreviated. Sometimes, you take the first two or three letters: Street = "St" or Avenue = "Ave." But at other times, you take the first letter and the last letter: Road = "Rd" (or perhaps "St," depending on how you look at it). And then at other times, you can take a few of the most notable consonants from the word: Boulevard = "Blvd" or Lane = "Ln." Why do we do abbreviations like this? I don't know. But it's interesting to observe.