Ungrammatical Spanish and Other Funny Street Names

After teaching college Spanish (language, literature, culture, history) for 12 years, I still get driven crazy by ungrammatical Spanish street names in the Inland Empire. Sigh. But I do refrain from whipping out the red pen. At any rate, the good news is, such names are unlikely to repeat between areas!

Moreno Valley has a lot of street names that look like someone looked in a bilingual dictionary and then jammed random words together. "Casa Encantador" should be "Casa Encantadora" and "Palos Grande" should be "Palos Grandes." In Murrieta, "Calle del Oso Oro" ought to be "Calle del Oso Dorado" and "La Alba" would be "El Alba" (yes, it's a feminine noun, but it starts in "a," has 2 syllables, and the first syllable is accentuated, therefore the singular articles would be "el" and "un").

Then there are the random names--did they run out of ideas? "Quebrada" means broken and "espaldar" means the back of a chair. Well, one thing is for sure, you won't find these street names in every city!