The trouble with ‘the’
April 11, 2005 | 12:00am
I got an interesting message a couple of weeks ago from a reader we’ll call Hannah, who wrote to bring up the trouble with "the," as you’ll see from her slightly edited letter below:
Dear Mr. Dalisay,
I’m writing this letter hoping that you could shed light on something I never thought was a problem with a vast majority of people, especially our new graduates and foreign nationals who have English as their second language.
It is the problem with the word "the." It seems that we don’t know when to use it. An example would be "I went to the Korea" or some other mind-numbing version of English that makes you wish people would speak in Tagalog instead.
I work in a profession where I am exposed to a lot of people. There was this one incident when I was in the US, where I met an obnoxious American who thought that the Philippines was some primitive Island in the Pacific. When he asked where I was from, I replied "the Philippines", whereupon he rudely informed me that "You don’t say THE Philippines. Do you say THE Italy or THE Canada?" I gave him some offhand answer and replied that "No, you don’t say The Italy or The Canada, you use THE for plural forms of places, like The Netherlands, The United States of America. You don’t say ‘I live in United States of America,’ do you?"
You can imagine his reaction to that plus the "bitch" I got in the wake of his departure. I also had to get used to Britons telling me, "Pam is in hospital today for a check-up."
On the other hand, I also use "the" to describe an occasion, such as my dinners with my in-laws. I would tell my friends, "I’m sorry I can’t, tonight is THE dinner," with matching finger quotations. Am I right to do that?
Thanks,
Hannah
Well, Hannah, you’re definitely on to something there, because I’ve noticed the same problems myself, although in different ways. For example, as an editor, I’ve often noticed how some journalists have begun dropping "the" at the start of sentences, as in "Suspects were brought to the city jail." Many Pinoys routinely say "majority of" instead of "the majority of" just as they truncate "as far as XXX is concerned" into "as far as" and "in fairness to" into "in fairness."
What I find even more pervasive, and thus more annoying, is our inexplicable propensity to say "the Filipinos," as in "Family ties are important to the Filipinos." Technically, there’s nothing wrong with it; of course you can say "the Filipinos", referring to us as a people or as a cultural entity. But the addition of the "the" introduces an unnecessary, clinical, and faintly disdainful distance between the speaker and his or her subject – as if the speaker were someone other than a Filipino. What aggravates the problem is how often people spell "Filipino" with a small F ("filipino"). Come on, folks, if there’s one thing we deserve to capitalize, it’s our own name!
Hannah’s experience with that American who thought he knew better than us about ourselves reminded me of my own brushes with the arrogance of some Americans – I actually wrote "American arrogance," but on second thought it’s unfair to turn the excesses or shortcomings of a few into a national trait – an arrogance born more of ignorance and presumption than anything else.
There was that time when, as a graduate student in Wisconsin, I brought a package to the post office for mailing to the Philippines, and wrote my home zip code on it. I put the package on the counter to be weighed, but a postal clerk then crooked a finger at me, and in a needlessly loud voice instructed me to fill out the zip code properly by putting in the last number. "But we have only four-figure zip codes in the Philippines," I told him. "Oh," he said, "isn’t the Philippines a territory of the United States?"
I could’ve given him a long answer – along the lines of "Not in fifty years, but in many respects, yes, I suppose you could say that we still are…" – but I decided to save the rest of the afternoon with a smile.
Okay, let’s get back to the "the." Indeed, sometimes it’s required, sometimes it’s dropped. British English – the nuances of which escape many of us Americanized Pinoys – favors such constructions as "Whilst he was at university Pitt became friendly with Lord Camden." "At university" is practically an idiomatic expression here, a sealed package you can’t mess with by inserting what in this case would be a superfluous "the." Idiom is often difficult to explain logically; it’s just the way native speakers have used the language over time, and the only way we second-language speakers can master it is through familiarity and memorization.
We’ve also developed our own unique expressions, of which one of my favorites is "in the province." It’s a prepositional phrase that will make perfect sense only to us Filipinos. When someone asks "Where were you last weekend?" and we say "In the province," what we really mean most of the time is that "I decided to take a break from this crazy city and my crazy job and visit my folks back home where life’s simpler and easier and I can rest properly, eat well, and remember and enjoy how things were." Of course that’s a highly romanticized view of the experience we call "the province," but I think it still largely holds true, as a wistful expectation if not a reality.
To sum up, we use "the" for specificity, to isolate and emphasize whatever "the" refers to above all other things like it – the girl next door, the Constitution, The Agony and the Ecstasy. If you removed "the" from that last example, you’d have a very different sense of things, something more abstract and rounded. That’s probably why, with a few exceptions, I’ve preferred to drop "the" from the title of my stories ("Oldtimer," "Delivery," "Voyager"), to enlarge the dimensions or the backdrop of the piece. And that’s the truth.
This week, I’d like to make a personal appeal to all alumni of the Philippine Science High School – especially those who, like unlikely me, graduated from the flagship Diliman campus back when it was the only show in town and no one called the place "Pisay."
That appeal is for you to participate in the election of officers for the new PSHS National Alumni Association (NAA). You can vote either by proxy, or by personally coming to the PSHS campus on Agham Road in Quezon City to cast your vote on Saturday, April 16. Either way, you’ll need to register first as an NAA member and pay a fee of P50 any day and anytime before 9 a.m. on April 16. The rules – a few rules too many and too complicated, I think – are posted on www.pshs.edu.ph. For more details, check out www.pshsaa.org, where you’ll get a better idea of the issues at stake in this exercise, at least from one point of view.
There is an existing PSHS Alumni Association, still the oldest and largest group of PSHS alumni, who now number about 3,000. (The PSHS started in 1964; originally a five-year high school, it graduated its first batch in 1969; I belonged to the third batch, entering in 1966.) But since the PSHS became a nationwide system in 1997, it now has seven campuses, thus the creation of a new National Alumni Association.
It’s funny (or should I say sad) how alumni politics can bring out both the best and the worst in people. I suspect it’s because alumni affairs offer the prospect of a Second Coming for the movers and shakers of our junior and senior years – and, for the once-nobodies, a second chance at showing their peers just what they missed.
One of my tasks as a university official was to liaise with the alumni, and you know what happened in UP the last time we had an alumni election – it was the messiest, dirtiest, costliest, ugliest pitched battle you ever saw between two groups of otherwise upstanding citizens and scholars. That ended up in the courts, and gave the university a big black eye. I didn’t want this to happen to my high school association – it’s only high school, and only an association, for crying out loud – but I have this uneasy feeling that unless those behind the NAA play fair, we might yet see the darker rather than the brighter side of our science scholars emerge.
In any case, vote to be heard and to be represented. We alumni should have something to say about how that school is being run – I’ve been hearing horror stories about how, for example, a literature teacher belonging to a powerful Catholic sect (yes, that one) won’t let her students read anything but texts that pass her own religious standards. Goodness me, in a science high school? I thought we were supposed to produce Galileos, not Pope Urbans.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
Dear Mr. Dalisay,
I’m writing this letter hoping that you could shed light on something I never thought was a problem with a vast majority of people, especially our new graduates and foreign nationals who have English as their second language.
It is the problem with the word "the." It seems that we don’t know when to use it. An example would be "I went to the Korea" or some other mind-numbing version of English that makes you wish people would speak in Tagalog instead.
I work in a profession where I am exposed to a lot of people. There was this one incident when I was in the US, where I met an obnoxious American who thought that the Philippines was some primitive Island in the Pacific. When he asked where I was from, I replied "the Philippines", whereupon he rudely informed me that "You don’t say THE Philippines. Do you say THE Italy or THE Canada?" I gave him some offhand answer and replied that "No, you don’t say The Italy or The Canada, you use THE for plural forms of places, like The Netherlands, The United States of America. You don’t say ‘I live in United States of America,’ do you?"
You can imagine his reaction to that plus the "bitch" I got in the wake of his departure. I also had to get used to Britons telling me, "Pam is in hospital today for a check-up."
On the other hand, I also use "the" to describe an occasion, such as my dinners with my in-laws. I would tell my friends, "I’m sorry I can’t, tonight is THE dinner," with matching finger quotations. Am I right to do that?
Thanks,
Hannah
Well, Hannah, you’re definitely on to something there, because I’ve noticed the same problems myself, although in different ways. For example, as an editor, I’ve often noticed how some journalists have begun dropping "the" at the start of sentences, as in "Suspects were brought to the city jail." Many Pinoys routinely say "majority of" instead of "the majority of" just as they truncate "as far as XXX is concerned" into "as far as" and "in fairness to" into "in fairness."
What I find even more pervasive, and thus more annoying, is our inexplicable propensity to say "the Filipinos," as in "Family ties are important to the Filipinos." Technically, there’s nothing wrong with it; of course you can say "the Filipinos", referring to us as a people or as a cultural entity. But the addition of the "the" introduces an unnecessary, clinical, and faintly disdainful distance between the speaker and his or her subject – as if the speaker were someone other than a Filipino. What aggravates the problem is how often people spell "Filipino" with a small F ("filipino"). Come on, folks, if there’s one thing we deserve to capitalize, it’s our own name!
Hannah’s experience with that American who thought he knew better than us about ourselves reminded me of my own brushes with the arrogance of some Americans – I actually wrote "American arrogance," but on second thought it’s unfair to turn the excesses or shortcomings of a few into a national trait – an arrogance born more of ignorance and presumption than anything else.
There was that time when, as a graduate student in Wisconsin, I brought a package to the post office for mailing to the Philippines, and wrote my home zip code on it. I put the package on the counter to be weighed, but a postal clerk then crooked a finger at me, and in a needlessly loud voice instructed me to fill out the zip code properly by putting in the last number. "But we have only four-figure zip codes in the Philippines," I told him. "Oh," he said, "isn’t the Philippines a territory of the United States?"
I could’ve given him a long answer – along the lines of "Not in fifty years, but in many respects, yes, I suppose you could say that we still are…" – but I decided to save the rest of the afternoon with a smile.
Okay, let’s get back to the "the." Indeed, sometimes it’s required, sometimes it’s dropped. British English – the nuances of which escape many of us Americanized Pinoys – favors such constructions as "Whilst he was at university Pitt became friendly with Lord Camden." "At university" is practically an idiomatic expression here, a sealed package you can’t mess with by inserting what in this case would be a superfluous "the." Idiom is often difficult to explain logically; it’s just the way native speakers have used the language over time, and the only way we second-language speakers can master it is through familiarity and memorization.
We’ve also developed our own unique expressions, of which one of my favorites is "in the province." It’s a prepositional phrase that will make perfect sense only to us Filipinos. When someone asks "Where were you last weekend?" and we say "In the province," what we really mean most of the time is that "I decided to take a break from this crazy city and my crazy job and visit my folks back home where life’s simpler and easier and I can rest properly, eat well, and remember and enjoy how things were." Of course that’s a highly romanticized view of the experience we call "the province," but I think it still largely holds true, as a wistful expectation if not a reality.
To sum up, we use "the" for specificity, to isolate and emphasize whatever "the" refers to above all other things like it – the girl next door, the Constitution, The Agony and the Ecstasy. If you removed "the" from that last example, you’d have a very different sense of things, something more abstract and rounded. That’s probably why, with a few exceptions, I’ve preferred to drop "the" from the title of my stories ("Oldtimer," "Delivery," "Voyager"), to enlarge the dimensions or the backdrop of the piece. And that’s the truth.
That appeal is for you to participate in the election of officers for the new PSHS National Alumni Association (NAA). You can vote either by proxy, or by personally coming to the PSHS campus on Agham Road in Quezon City to cast your vote on Saturday, April 16. Either way, you’ll need to register first as an NAA member and pay a fee of P50 any day and anytime before 9 a.m. on April 16. The rules – a few rules too many and too complicated, I think – are posted on www.pshs.edu.ph. For more details, check out www.pshsaa.org, where you’ll get a better idea of the issues at stake in this exercise, at least from one point of view.
There is an existing PSHS Alumni Association, still the oldest and largest group of PSHS alumni, who now number about 3,000. (The PSHS started in 1964; originally a five-year high school, it graduated its first batch in 1969; I belonged to the third batch, entering in 1966.) But since the PSHS became a nationwide system in 1997, it now has seven campuses, thus the creation of a new National Alumni Association.
It’s funny (or should I say sad) how alumni politics can bring out both the best and the worst in people. I suspect it’s because alumni affairs offer the prospect of a Second Coming for the movers and shakers of our junior and senior years – and, for the once-nobodies, a second chance at showing their peers just what they missed.
One of my tasks as a university official was to liaise with the alumni, and you know what happened in UP the last time we had an alumni election – it was the messiest, dirtiest, costliest, ugliest pitched battle you ever saw between two groups of otherwise upstanding citizens and scholars. That ended up in the courts, and gave the university a big black eye. I didn’t want this to happen to my high school association – it’s only high school, and only an association, for crying out loud – but I have this uneasy feeling that unless those behind the NAA play fair, we might yet see the darker rather than the brighter side of our science scholars emerge.
In any case, vote to be heard and to be represented. We alumni should have something to say about how that school is being run – I’ve been hearing horror stories about how, for example, a literature teacher belonging to a powerful Catholic sect (yes, that one) won’t let her students read anything but texts that pass her own religious standards. Goodness me, in a science high school? I thought we were supposed to produce Galileos, not Pope Urbans.
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