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 ha
A blog of word lore and word-based games.