you get ROAD movies but practice STREET photography – what’s the difference?
You get a lot of results if you do a search on the phrase road street difference. Put simply:
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- road= a route or way on land between two places that has been paved to allow travel by transport.
- street= a paved public road that only appears in a city or town, not in rural areas
– from Woodward English Vocabulary
But of course, it isn’t that simple. The above works generally for cities in the USA (where you have the added convention of having avenues running perpendicular to streets in a grid system) but isn’t standardised across towns and cities in the UK. I live in Devonshire Road, it has buildings on both sides, is in a city and doesn’t really go anywhere (although it’s not a cul de sac); in other words it’s really a street, whereas Boundary Road (which it is perpendicular to) marks the (old) boundary between Leyton and Walthamstow, which now runs along the middle of the Lea Bridge Road, as it takes you all the way from Epping Forest (in the east) to the bridges over the Lea navigation (in the west) and over it to end at the Clapton roundabout. There is a Roman road called Watling Street that runs from the south coast, through the outpost of London, and on towards the wilds of Wales, but Watling Street is a name given to it later. No one knows what the Romans called it, but presumably it was a Via – or way.
For this part of the module, I’ll use the simple definition that a road leads somewhere (and can of course be a metaphor such as the road to ruin) while a street is (part of) a destination, like Oxford Street in London, or ‘the street’ which runs through the centre of Kirkwall comprising Bridge Street, Albert Street, Broad Street and Victoria Street. Here the street seems to denote the commercial centre of an urban area, and possibly therefore can be seen as an example of metonymy, where a part comes to represent the whole, like the American idea of Main Street standing as a token for all of small-town America…
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- journey (noun) = an act of travelling from one place to another
Again this can be literal – the journey to work, or the journey to Southend on a train or in the car – but like road, journey also is used as a metaphor: this module is part of my learning journey , after all. The key thing is that a journey is an ongoing process – it focuses on the getting there (the road) rather than the there itself (a street perhaps) – and so journey is also used as a verb.
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- journey (verb) = to travel somewhere
– both Journey definitions, from Google Dictionary
Reference:
in other news…
Landscape, Place and Environment - Simon Chirgwin 