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.
There is a certain amount of linguistic Zen that comes from playing simple word unscrambler games, spinning around the question of why some words are accepted and others are not. A few nights back we played UNRULY, and for fun, I tried RULY on a whim, and the game accepted it, when I know other games have rejected it. I tried explaining it to Anne. It felt like a word to me, and it's in Merriam-Webster with the same example I thought of at the time: "I have seen some ruly crowds." It turns out that MW has a fascinating story about these two words, see here . "Ruly" did exist for centuries, got replaced by UNRULY, only to come back as a back-formation from UNRULY to fill the gap it once filled. It turns out that these cases are considered "Lost positives", words where the positive root word has faded from usage while the negation of the word is still going strong. Here is a video from RobWords that gives a good overview. I have been enjoy...
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