Comment on When a place is called " Heights", what does "heights" mean/refer to?
bandario@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months agoThat’s generally how it’s used in Australia. There will be an existing suburb named ‘generic suburb’, and developers will come and build a new housing development full of cookie cutter houses on 300m2 blocks with their gutters near touching eachother and call it ‘generic suburb heights’ as an attempt to give the schmucks that buy there some sort of feeling of prestige over the older neighbourhood with larger block sizes and more human compatible dwellings.
Other guy in here nailed it with the British origins but for some reason he’s been downvoted.
squaresinger@feddit.de 10 months ago
Because he put in the same comment, that high street and highway are called that way because they where elevated over the other streets, which is nonsense.
In fact, high street/highway are that way, because in Old English high didn’t only denote elevation, but also a high status/rank/importance.
Modern English still uses that meaning, but it’s rarer nowadays. For example, high society, high sheriff or high priest aren’t called that because they are tall.
High is also used with a lot of words where elevation doesn’t matter: high rank, high value and so on.