August 05, 2006

The poor definite article

Articles have remained the most ignored grammatical objects to both editors and writers. Stories get in print saying 'the Thursday's meeting' when it should be either 'Thursday's meeting' or 'the Thursday meeting.'

Unqualified plural count nouns are often modified with the definite article, such as 'The schoolteachers went on a strike' when 'Schoolteachers went on a strike' should be correct.

Gerundial consruction of possession with 'of' are quite often written without the definite article -- 'the buying of the papers' gets written or even edited as 'buying of the papers.'

The word 'society' which should not take 'the' unless modified otherwise is written as 'the society;' and 'the country' and 'the government' which alone should always take 'the' to mean Bangladesh's are often written 'country' or 'government' with a tendency to capitalise the words as a trail of the officialese that was once prominant in Bangladesh's newspapers.

The word is frequently dropped where it should be and it is often added where it should not be -- making the structure difficult to understand, sometimes at the cost of a change of meaning. After all, there is a difference between 'What is time?' which warrants a scientific explanation, and 'What is the time?' which anyone who has just learnt how to tell the time can answer.

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