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Why the Littlest Words Can Mean a Lot

By Roy Peter Clark

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There are occasions, of course, when an substitutes for a, a distinction influenced by sound. The path to getting this right is simple and governed by your dialect and your ear. If a word begins with a consonant sound, use a. A vowel sound requires an. The key word in this lesson is "sound," not letter.  "A ball" or "an egg" is easy enough. But some initial vowels produce consonant sounds, which is why we'd say "He delivered a eulogy the family will remember for years," or "That garage band was a one-hit wonder." (That initial y or w sound governs.) The problem child, historically, has been the letter h. Even though the letter is a consonant, it stands silent (especially in England) at the beginning of some words. I'm inclined to write "She's working on a historical novel before getting a hysterectomy, an honorable effort to be sure." Two tips: 1.) Let your ear influence your choice; 2) Check the stylebook that governs your profession.

If you are living inside the English language, you will find yourself one day tinkering with a and the. The switch from one to the other can bring dramatic changes in meaning, tone, and reader response. What if the title of the big book and movie had been "Gone with a Wind?"

I remember the day, not long ago, I was preparing to meet with the mayor of St. Petersburg, Fla., with the goal of persuading His Honor to proclaim to the world that we lived in "A City of Writers." But the first time I wrote that phrase it came out "The City of Writers." A friend asked, "Do we want to be 'the city' or 'a city'?"  I couldn't decide. I was definitely indefinite. But I knew that the distinction mattered.

Thanks to a favorite book, "Authors at Work," I can hold in my hands a photo of the original manuscript of "Ode to a Skylark," by 19th century poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Very clearly, you can see where the poet has revised his title. The handwritten original reads "To the Sky-Lark." The same hand has crossed out the the and replaced it with a. What, I wondered, did the poet have in mind?

In the specialized language about language, the words the and a (or an) are called articles. And, in a distinction that is not as useful as it sounds, a is called an "indefinite" article, while the is termed "definite."

There are cases where the the seems to define the word it modifies, as in names of institutions such as The New York Times, or when obnoxious Buckeye football fans in Columbus, Ohio, insist that they attend THE (pronounced thee) Ohio State University, as if it were the only one. (Residents of the Windy City add a regional flavor by sometimes referring to their professional football team as "Da Bears.")

Check out this sentence by Robert Atwan, taken from an introduction to a collection of honored essays: "But the hardy type of essay that evolved from Montaigne's innovative prose has long been identified as the essay, and it has received many labels over the centuries: the informal essay, the periodical essay, the moral essay, the anecdotal essay, the familiar essay, the personal essay, the true essay, and even ... the 'right' essay." If you are a counter, you will find ten definite articles in this single sentence, but one carries in the author's mind more definite weight than the others, so he casts it in italics: the essay."

Historian Michael Kazin understood the importance of the in his reflection upon the status of his famous father, author Alfred Kazin: "He routinely wrote long pieces for The New York Times Book Review, and on occasion, the identifying caption would read, 'the critic and teacher Alfred Kazin.' The authority of that definite article! ... Anyone who didn't [know who Alfred Kazin was] was clearly a newcomer to serious literary conversation and needed a quick, if subtle, lesson about who deserved a the and who did not."

(Writing about the's and a's has given me a bit of a migraine since I've tried -- until now -- to avoid using the plural of each.)

One way to feel the difference between them is to take familiar titles and change one to the other:

• "The Day to Remember"
• "A Godfather"
• "A Holy Bible"
• "A Great Gatsby"
• "The House is not the Home"
• "Land of the Thousand Dances"
• "A Power and a Glory"
• "The Little Night Music"
• "The Man for All Seasons"
• "A Star-Spangled Banner"
• "The Separate Peace"
• "A Catcher in the Rye"
• "A Wizard of Oz"
  

Not long ago, I encountered this sentence in an e-mail message: "The Internet is an internet." The definite is redefined as indefinite.

I'd like to object for a moment, on behalf of the word a to the designation "indefinite." For while a may not give us the defining example, it offers an effect writers crave: the power of particularity. This is why Shelley crosses out the and replaces it with a: because he does not want you to see or hear the "idea" of the bird as a surrogate for the poet before experiencing the bird in all its physical splendor:


At the end of the day, I chose "A City of Writers" rather than "The City" so as not to turn my palm-treed metropolis into an ideal. St. Petersburg is a real place, not an abstraction, and might become a model for others. There is a humility in a not present in the, often used to exaggerate the truth for marketing purposes, as in "The one and only!"

Articles are slippery. You might be fooled into thinking that a can only be used in the singular and that the carries the plural until you read "A million dollars will get you the rarest baseball card in the world."

"You've produced a masterpiece" has the sense of the definite about it. And "enter the third door on the left" expresses well enough the particular.

Here's the moral of this essay: If you are working inside the language, no decision is too small. The subtlest of changes with the smallest words can create the most dramatic effects. Consider the weight of the definite article (used as a noun) at the end of this critique by author Mary McCarthy of the writings of her rival, Lillian Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the."

Full post as published by Writing Tools on May 28, 2008 (boomark / email).