Crossroads
From Free net encyclopedia
- For other uses, see Crossroads (disambiguation).
A crossroads (the word rarely appears in singular) is another word for road junction (or to be more precice, a road intersection), where two or more roads meet (there are three or more arms). In British English it is specifically defined as being where two roads cross each other (there are exactly 4 arms). Unlike the terms road intersection and road junction, crossroads is used in a more figurative or poetic sense (similar to fork in the road).
Crossroads is also an alternate name for a hamlet located at such a junction. The word is more often used as an abstraction of places or occasions where people meet. The Latin word trivia (literally "three roads") is a place where three roads meet, and has given name to the kind of smalltalk that often occurs at such places.
Another interpretation of the crossroad hinted at by some blues songs is that point at which a particular road is taken in life - similar to Robert Frosts' 'road not taken'. In some Asian cultures further interpretations and traditions about what crossroads are diverge from the explanations given above.
Originally the blues "Crossroads" was a literal crossing of two railroads - "where the Southern cross the Dog" - in Moorhead, Mississippi (Template:Coor d). The "Southern" was a line of the Southern Railway, sold to the Columbus and Greenville Railway in 1920, and the "Dog" was the "Yellow Dog", officially the Yazoo Delta Railroad, part of the Illinois Central Railroad system after 1897.
The crossroads is also used as a metaphor for the afterlife.