How much do you know about the word the? Unlike some words, like “banana” or “schooner” the is a confounding word because it lacks an equivalent in the real world. It’s not like a the is a species of animal hopping around in a field somewhere. If asked to define the, most people would pause; upon reflection, some might conjure up the answer “the definite article,” but that’s only one of the’s many hats. Even the dictionary has difficulty describing the; as a sort of ersatz definition, the writers of Webster’s New World Dictionary compiled a full paragraph of conditions where the may occur, but even this is missing something.

The as we know it was first written down in Old English, meaning it was born sometime before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Like many Germanic languages, English used to have three grammatical genders and a case system, resulting in 14 different versions of the. Sometime after good ol’ Billy the Conqueror took over, however, a linguistic orgy merged the fourteen versions into one rather lonely article, the sexually frustrated ancestor of our modern-day the. But wait, you might ask, what about “ye”? Unfortunately for the, ye wasn’t actually a word in its own right in Old English, but was instead an alternate spelling of the.

In its modern incarnation, the has a special, function-based meaning that it derives from the surrounding words and phrases. The syntax of the, or how it can be positioned within a sentence, is straightforward in standard English. The comes before nouns, or pairings of nouns and adjectives, as in the dog or the cat, or the bizarre cat-dog hybrid. But the is currently undergoing a gradual change, at least in some areas of language – namely, the Internet and, more recently, advertising. Here’s a one-sentence summary: Carelessness online led to an extremely common typo of “teh” for the, which eventually took on its own grammar in constructions like “teh stupid” and “teh Internet.” Go ahead and say “the stupid” to your grandmother; she’ll probably look confused for a while, and then point back at you. But online, teh or the followed by an adjective is a grammatically correct phrase, and guess what? It’s spreading.

The best example of this in the real world is Microsoft’s campaign for its Zune MP3 player, the slogan for which is, “Welcome to the social.” Yep, that’s right, the social. Some people would write the slogan off as incorrect grammar used for the shock value – or at least the mild annoyance value, for those among us who don’t cry at dangling modifiers. But I would argue that this slogan, with its parallels online, is an example of language change in progress. This is the future of the, and it is the cool, as far as I’m concerned.

Not only is the interesting on the level of individual sentences, but it also carries a lot of meaning in conversation. The represents knowledge; it marks what is known within the frames of the conversation, or the relationship between the speakers or the culture at large. If your friend walked up and asked, “Do you have the pencil?” you’d be at a loss, wondering which specific pencil he means; contrast that with, “Do you have a pencil?” The can also identify things that are known within a group of friends, and on a larger scale the indicates what is known by everyone within a culture, as in archetypes like “the virgin and the whore.” It is through this path that the power of the becomes apparent, for an awareness of the’s uses brings with it insight into what is considered fundamental within a particular text, or social group or even a whole culture.

The is the most common word in the English language, and yet few people know its whole story. The field of linguistics aims to identify speakers’ intuitions about the – and every other linguistic structure, in each of the world’s 6,800 languages – in order to learn about both the language in question and the surrounding culture. If you found the story of the to be an interesting one, consider signing up for a course in linguistics – you never know what you might discover.

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