The Batman. Hospital. The Ohio State. Facebook. The Star Wars. There seems to be no greater sweetness in life than adding or removing the definite article the. There’s an odd satisfaction that comes from unexpected syntax, whether it’s 2022’s The Batman movie or every time your heart skips with glee when, as an American, you hear a British person talk about ‘going to hospital’. Oh boy it feels so good!
What Does ‘The’ Mean?
Merriam-Webster mentions that function words like articles and prepositions are really hard to define, because they “actually indicate grammatical relationships with other words more than conveying meaning themselves”.1 Look up the in the dictionary and you’ll get about 20 different usage notes explaining how to use the. But not really what the means.
The Online Etymology Dictionary states the word comes from the “late Old English þe, nominative masculine form of the demonstrative pronoun and adjective”2 making it similar in root to thee and thou. Articles are kind of weird, because they add descriptive information to nouns just like adjectives. But they come from similar etymological roots to pronouns. Articles are just one of those things we use all the time in very complex ways, but just never think about.
But articles in English aren’t all that complex compared to how they’re used in some languages. The, obviously, refers to something specific, whereas a and an refer to something more general. And that’s kind of it. In this sense, there isn’t much to reveal about the word the that any fluent English speaker doesn’t already know. But sometimes we do and don’t use the in ways that drastically alter the meaning of the noun being determined.
To ‘The’
Whether it’s the library or a movie collection, when forming an alphabetical list of titles, the generally falls under the category of take-it-or-leave-it. But if you think the isn’t important, then consider the fact that, in 2019, Ohio State University tried to trademark the word the with the US patent office.
The Ohio State
To be clear, they didn’t try to trademark the phrase, “The Ohio State”. They tried to trademark the solitary word the…so they could put it on sweatshirts. Yeah, a sweatshirt with just the word the on it. Unfortunately, Ohio State was unable to procure the rights to the word the, not because that’s a stupid idea, but because the clothing company Marc Jacobs beat them to it. 3
Of course, some organizations can get real particular when it comes to whether you use the word the in front of their names. For example, The New York Times, includes the as a part of their name, but the Los Angeles Times does not. So when using their name in a sentence, you would not capitalize the t in the (and nor would you italicize the word itself).
The Batman
And then, of course there’s the Batman—not the 2022 movie The Batman—just the concept of calling Batman, the Batman. As most grammar guides will tell you, we generally don’t use the definite article in front of the proper names of people. For example, you wouldn’t say the Frederick Douglass. It sounds silly—as if Frederick was a descriptor of the type of Douglass we were talking about.
But we do use definite articles before general nouns when there is only one: for example, the Sun and the Moon.4 In this way, calling Batman the Batman strips the character of the personal name, Batman, and instead applies the descriptor of Bat-man onto an unknown figure. And the opposite works too. Imagine referring to the Sun as just Sun. It almost sounds like you’re on a first-name basis with a giant ball of gas. Removing the personalizes, but adding a the depersonalizes.
Or Not To ‘The’
And that leads us directly to Facebook and the odd satisfaction we get from removing the word the. As anyone who’s seen the 2010 movie The Social Network can tell you, before Facebook began their quest to make the dystopian future of Terminator a reality, it was known as TheFacebook.
In its first incarnation, Facebook was known as Facemash, but soon came to be called TheFacebook. Then somewhere around 2005, Justin Timberlake danced on over to TheFacebook’s founders and hit them with “Drop the ‘the’. Just Facebook. It’s cleaner.”5 and moonwalked away.
Tech bros seem to be obsessed with minimalism, no matter how inconvenient it becomes for other people. But Sean Parker—I mean Justin Timberlake—might have been right about this one. As Anja Drobnjak from Domain.Me says,
“Can you imagine asking someone if he or she has the TheFacebook account? Probably not. Although I think that TheFacebook was going to survive anyhow, the beauty of a successful brand lies in its simplicity. And they made it happen. In a blink of an eye, with the change of a domain name (and the name of the brand) Facebook evolved from Ivy league social network to the first thing all of us think after waking up.”6
Star Wars
There’s just something so satisfying about removing the from names. Star Wars was originally called The Star Wars in early drafts of George Lucas’s script before becoming Adventures of the Starkiller as taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars, then Adventures of Luke Starkiller Episode I: The Star Wars until some accountants told Lucas, “Dude, just call it Star Wars and be done with it.”
British English vs American English
And then of course, there’s that particular way in which speakers of British English decidedly don’t use articles: ‘I’m going on holiday…’ or ‘Back when I was at university…’ or ‘Did you hear he’s in hospital?’ As Americans, we always preface these words with an article—’She’s taking a holiday’ “My grandma is in the hospital…’—so it’s one of those little linguistic quirks (like math and maths) that make anglophiles squee with glee. But it’s actually not that different from what we do in American English.
How is, ‘When I was in college…’ all that different from ‘When I was at university…’? And of course, while Americans don’t say ‘While I was on holiday…’, we do say ‘While I was on vacation…’.
In both American English and British English, there seems to be some distinction between talking about a physical object and talking about the use of that object.7 Even in British English you wouldn’t say, ‘I’m standing right outside of hospital.’ You would still say (just as in American English) ‘I’m standing right outside of the hospital.’ But if someone is using the services of the hospital, British English speakers would say, ‘They’re in hospital.’
This is just like how, in both American and British English, if someone said, ‘I’m going to bed’ we would take that to mean, ‘I’m going to sleep (in a bed).’ But if someone said, ‘I’m going to the bed’ we take that to mean ‘I’m going to approach the physical object of a bed (presumably for some purpose other than sleeping).’
A Definite Article
As anyone who’s first language isn’t a European language can tell you, the way we use articles (particularly in English) is pretty arbitrary. Some rules are codified and can be learned in a classroom. But some rules you just have to figure out by using the language.
Why do we get equal satisfaction from adding the as we do from removing it? Well, it seems like the word the is a lot like beards: If everyone’s doing it, don’t. But if no one’s doing it, go for it.
- “Trend Watch: Ohio State Files Trademark on ‘The'” | Merriam-Webster | 14 Aug 2019
- “the” | Online Etymology Dictionary
- Boren, Cindy | “The Ohio State University wants to trademark its favorite word: ‘The’” | The Washington Post | 14 Aug 2019
- “Unit 11: The definite article: grammar reference” | BBC Learning English
- Sorkin, Aaron | The Social Network screenplay | 2010
- Drobnjak, Anja | “From TheFacebook.com to Facebook.com to FB.ME to M.ME” | Domain.Me | 21 Sept 2017
- Uticensis | “Is there a reason the British omit the article when they “go to hospital”?” | English.StackExchange.com | 5 Apr 2011