A few weeks back I stumbled onto a Youtube video where a professor was discussing an unusual usage of the word "the" in English. It's the most commonly used word in the language, and is simply a definite article, saying that the noun after is a specific item ("the chair"), not a general item ("a chair") -- those use the indefinite articles "a' and "an".
The specific phrase being discussed was "the more, the merrier", when they were trying to make a case that the effect of "the" in this example was a primitive form of "if .. then ...". So, it means "if more, then merrier."
This sounded rather fanciful to me. It could simply be indicating the same definite thing or grouping twice, as in "this group has more, this same group is merrier." Although, the phrase "the more" is definitely (no pun intended) unusual, since more is not a noun, not a thing of its own. How can you have a specific instance of "more"?
On the other hand, the phrase can also be taken as a saying, idiom or colloquialism, where the sequence of words does not easily break down into smaller units. The Cambridge dictionary has some examples of this phrase in use.
However, etymonline, has a lot more detail in its article about "the", describing the construction as a pair of adverbial clauses, where the first "the" is actually a relic of an earlier form of "that", so the phrase boils down to "that which is more, is merrier".
Similar phrases are "the sooner the better" and "the less said the better", but my brain pictures these having commas in the middle. Now it looks like they never did, going back to examples from the 18th century. I could start a rant about the Mandela effect or just admit that I was wrong on this obscure point.
It was late at night, and now I can't find any trace of that video in my youtube history. But I think I found enough substance to show there is a discussion to be had on this unusual, seemingly generic kind of phrase.
Here is another case where two words differ in American/British meaning based on an extra E: STORY and STOREY. You can tell a STORY, it's a piece of narration or fiction, or a news story. I don't normally think of it as a verb, but it can be. I would normally say I was telling a STORY, but I could be STORYING. Having finished the STORY, I suppose I am all STORIED out. But, STORIED fits as an adjective too: if many stories have been told about you, you have lived a STORIED life. STOREY is a floor in a house, and to make matters a little more complex, in the British Isles, what we call the first floor (Am) is the ground floor and our second floor is their first storey (floor). A taller building could have multiple STOREYS. Merriam-Webster says that this STOREY is just a less common version of STORY, but it always felt to me like a specifically British version. Cambridge has STOREYED, which would be used as an adjective, as in "a three-storeyed ho...
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