Today in my undergrad course, as preparation for their Lexiculture papers as well as introducing them to a module on North American English dialects, I decided to take them through the process of researching a phrase known to all of them, but almost certainly not to most of you: “Michigan left”. This is the phenomenon, nearly unique to Michigan, where left turns are prohibited at an intersections where there is a median, but instead, you turn right, shift left across one or more lanes, and then several hundred feet later, you do a U-turn in a special U-turn lane for the purpose. It’s also known as a median u-turn crossover, although no one ever calls it that.
Every single student in my class had heard this term. I learned what it was very shortly after arriving here, because these turns are ubiquitous in metro Detroit. And yet there is no entry for Michigan left in the Oxford English Dictionary, and also none in the Dictionary of American Regional English. This, as I told my students, is interesting.
I asked them to speculate when it might have originated, and they immediately developed two very reasonable hypotheses: a) that it originated with the early days of the automobile, which is iconically associated with Michigan, of course; b) that it was associated with the period of massive expansion of roadways in the 1960s, particularly as Detroit’s white population left for the suburbs. Before looking into it today, I would have bet on the second hypothesis, and indeed, very shortly, we discovered a very useful page, Michigan Highways, confirming that this road setup was first initiated in 1960.
The only problem is that there is absolutely no evidence for the phrase Michigan left, or any variation of it, before 1993, at which time it turns up in a handful of technical reports written by transportation nerds, e.g.:
“The scene showed traveling on Ecorse Road 1/2 mile to Hannan Road and turning north for 2 mi where it turned onto Michigan Ave (US-12), which required a Michigan left turn. (A Michigan left turn is a right turn followed by a U-turn, to make a left.)” (Green, P., et al. 1993. Examination of a videotape-based method to evaluate the usability of route guidance and traffic information systems. University of Michigan, Transportation Research Institute, p. 7)
As I noted to the students, the fact that a Michigan-based technical report written for road experts felt it necessary to define the term suggests that we are not far off the actual date of origin. But the fact that they used the term ‘Michigan left’ at all, as opposed to a technical term like ‘median u-turn crossover’, suggests that it must have had some currency at that time. So my guess would be 1985-1990 as a reasonable point of origin.
It was very surprising for them (and me!) to think that the phrase originated within most of their lifetimes, because it’s just so ubiquitous in Michigan English today. But there’s a lot of evidence for this late date of origin: instances of the phrase pick up rapidly in the 1990s, but almost entirely in Michigan-based publications and newspapers, and almost all defining the term immediately after using it. There were a few attested instances in North Carolina, where apparently someone decided to emulate the Michigan traffic system, and almost none anywhere else. This confirms that, unlike toponymic phrases coined by outsiders to mark the unusual nature of other people, Michigan left was coined by insiders in recognition of a unique characteristic of the state.
It’s commonly the case that people think that words and expressions are much more recent than they are – this is the recency illusion, a term coined by the linguist Arnold Zwicky. But with Michigan left, we have the opposite: we have a recent phrase which is believed by its users to be older than it actually is; Zwicky calls this the Antiquity Illusion. In this case, I suspect the illusion is so strong because the phenomenon being described – being forced to turn right and then do a U-turn – is older than the word itself. People of virtually any age can remember doing the deed, and so they naturally associate it with the now-existing word. I and the students did searches for a variety of other phrases (Michigan U-turn, Michigan turnaround) without any luck, suggesting that in fact, prior to the 1980s or even the early 1990s, there simply was no common phrase for the Michigan left.
All of which raises a final, and possibly unanswerable question: how and why, after a quarter century of existence, did this concept finally acquire a name?
Glossographia 
The term Potcake for stray dogs in the Bahamas is similar that way – people think it has always been around, when it it actually historically pretty recent (from about the 1970’s at most).
Neat! A very brief search confirms your thought that it’s from the 1970s – and again, the OED has no entry.
I worked in Michigan, specifically Detroit and suburbs, a lot in the mid 1980s and I had not heard the expression “Michigan left” until today.
That’s very useful information – I’ll let my students know, as this is exactly the sort of information I need to convince them that it could be as recent as that. But for the record – do you know the concept, and do you have any expression for it?
I don’t have a word for it. I don’t even remember it as a feature of Detroit driving. I did encounter something similar in Melbourne on streets that had trams.
The term has come up in transit geek discussions recently (~2008) here in Toronto, in the context of how to best implement left turns along new streetcar and LRT medians.
We spent about ten minutes in class on Thursday talking about the Michigan left intersections we hate the most. Mine is one where, in order to get where I was going, I had to do the median U-turn and then immediately cross three lanes of busy rush hour traffic to turn right.
It looks like Plano, Texas has been having discussions about Michigan lefts as of this year, so maybe the term is just at the start of a wider diffusion.
We have the same traffic rule in Melbourne, Australia. However, we drive on the other side of the road, so it pertains to right turns, and only in the presence of trams. Strangely enough, we don’t call them ‘Michigan lefts’ but ‘hook turns‘. I’d never heard of a ‘Michigan Left’ before, but then I guess a ‘hook turn’ would be as equally opaque to a Michiganite.
I’m not sure, looking at the Wikipedia entry, that these are the same thing. A hook turn seems to be a right turn from the leftmost lane. Here is what an average Michigan left might look like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MichiganLeftSigns.png
I believe Michigander is the preferred term these days…
I love Michigan lefts., especially after experiencing some of the nightmarish intersections down in Ohio and Illinois that require you to use driveways and parking lots to make U-turns.
My on-the-spot theory is that the distinction was born out of a need to easily describe driving directions, and the term ‘Michigan’ was adopted due to common knowledge that they were almost exclusively found in Michigan, and a lack of anything else better to tack on (‘special’ left? ‘Conditional left’?). And when giving egocentric directions, it seems to me much easier to just have a qualified, ‘certain kind of left’ so ultimately you’re still navigating in terms of left and right.
Also, Michigan left can be used for two different actions depending on if you’re on the divided highway or on the road that intersects it. A ‘Michigan left’ is both a right turn followed by a U-turn, and a “go past the intersection, make a U-turn, then make a right”. So really, the single term ‘Michigan left’ describes two separate but similar actions that have the same outcome.
As for why the distinction had to be made, when any self-respecting Michigan driver can see that ‘left’ really means ‘Michigan left’ when faced with certain intersections? Well… it could just be that the idea of turning right + u-turn(or u-turn + right!) felt too different to be left without any qualifier at all?
I find it interesting that it was a locally-derived term that nonetheless takes the geographic designator. It’s like they were so proud of their uniqueness that they made up a word for it.
You’re quite right that both U-turn + right and right + U-turn can be described as a ‘Michigan left’ – of course, where you have two divided roads intersecting, you can do either one.
I thought that contruction was called a jughandle. I would have learned that in the Northeast, I think, but they aren’t particularly common there.
I think a jughandle is something different – in a Michigan left, you really don’t ever turn left at all, whereas in a jughandle, you turn left, but before the actual intersection. The only special lane in a Michigan left is the U-turn lane that crosses the median.
I’m working on a project for my Transportation Engineering class the University of Toledo. Not many people had heard of the “Michigan Left.” But, they are very common on main roads, specifically cities like Taylor and Farmington hills. The class didn’t go into much detail about them, since they are so localized and considered “out of state engineering,” but Wayne State recently received funds to try to implement them in national programs.