The definite artisticle
Posted on Tuesday, June 27, 2006Let me just ask you this, if you don’t mind. I’ll just mention this small thing to you that has pissed me off for years, even though by any standards it’s a trivial matter. I know. Trivial is too big a word for it, but still, bear with me.
It’s the selective use of the definite article that bothers me.
What?
Well, you know when you read a newspaper, or maybe listen to some pretentious radio show, and they’re talking about some fucking gobshite who wants to carve an effigy of his own arse in a pile of decaying sheep’s liver. Tonight, we talk to the sculptor, Stephen Clambake.
Excuse me? The sculptor? What fucking sculptor? I never fucking heard of him. Oh, you mean some pampered wanker from Killiney who just graduated from NCAD? (Thanks, like Mum and, like, Dod). THE sculptor? What?? The comedian. The painter. The composer. As if any of us has ever heard of a single one of these talentless gobshites? The? What the . . .? How come they never say “a sculptor” or “a composer”? No matter how obscure or talentless you are, if you’re any way vaguely arty at all, they’ll call you the, as though everybody has heard of you.
Is this, or is it not, smugness gone insane? Did you ever hear Myles Dungan on the radio (the man who, for some reason, can’t pronounce the word “art”) talk about any other profession in the same reverential tones? Yes, of course you did. I nearly forgot: The architect.
But apart from these, why don’t other activities merit the same definite article in our media? Tarquin Murphy, the plumber. Bonaparte Quinn, the carpenter. Fiachra McFadden, the spark. Jezebel Smallbore, the cosmologist. No. Oh Jesus no. That wouldn’t do.
Of course, if you were talking about Aureliano Buendia, the international assassin, that would be different, cos he’d be foreign, and therefore interesting, and the implication would be that anyone who’s anyone has heard of the cocksucker, which is why we’d award him the definite article: it’s a signal to all the other Dunganistas that we still have control of the free bar.
What a difference a “the” makes.
Stumble it!
