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Grammar question
Feb. 28th, 2006 08:38 amI have a grammar question about the use of articles before proper nouns and regular nouns. What's the protocol? Because I noticed something yesterday -twice!- that bothered me, and I can't figure out what the grammar rule is.
Watching an old episode of The West Wing, a congressman from Maryland told Josh Lyman that "[he] really should come see Chesapeake Bay." Then, as I was reading Julie Miller's Harlequin Blaze, Basic Training, I noticed that she did the same thing more or less, talking about a town located "on Chesapeake Bay." The thing that makes me scratch my head is that both statements seem to indicate that there is only one way to see or be located on the bay. As if it wasn't the largest estuary in the US, nearly 200 miles long and 30 miles wide, with more than 15,000 miles of shoreline in Maryland and Virginia.
Tangent: I grew up in a town on the Upper Bay. One of my best friends from college grew up in a town on the Lower Bay. Neither of us ever refers to the bay without an article. Nor would I refer to the Atlantic Ocean, the Mississippi River or the Nile without including the article before the proper noun. But hearing and reading two separate references to the bay without the article before it made me wonder if our grammar is somehow local, if we assign an article to the bay because of our proximity and its importance in our lives. [My family were commercial fishermen until my generation; I worked on the retail side of the business as a teenager. It was backbreaking work -- only someone who loves the water can do that for a lifetime. Her family runs a marina, and as a teenager her summer job was picking crabs at the local crab-packing plant.]
Editted to add: I checked out Wikipedia, which indicated one use of 'the' is to indicate uniqueness...which kind of makes sense. And it links to a dissertation on the use of 'the' in English, which might be helpful. Strunk and White was not so helpful.
Watching an old episode of The West Wing, a congressman from Maryland told Josh Lyman that "[he] really should come see Chesapeake Bay." Then, as I was reading Julie Miller's Harlequin Blaze, Basic Training, I noticed that she did the same thing more or less, talking about a town located "on Chesapeake Bay." The thing that makes me scratch my head is that both statements seem to indicate that there is only one way to see or be located on the bay. As if it wasn't the largest estuary in the US, nearly 200 miles long and 30 miles wide, with more than 15,000 miles of shoreline in Maryland and Virginia.
Tangent: I grew up in a town on the Upper Bay. One of my best friends from college grew up in a town on the Lower Bay. Neither of us ever refers to the bay without an article. Nor would I refer to the Atlantic Ocean, the Mississippi River or the Nile without including the article before the proper noun. But hearing and reading two separate references to the bay without the article before it made me wonder if our grammar is somehow local, if we assign an article to the bay because of our proximity and its importance in our lives. [My family were commercial fishermen until my generation; I worked on the retail side of the business as a teenager. It was backbreaking work -- only someone who loves the water can do that for a lifetime. Her family runs a marina, and as a teenager her summer job was picking crabs at the local crab-packing plant.]
Editted to add: I checked out Wikipedia, which indicated one use of 'the' is to indicate uniqueness...which kind of makes sense. And it links to a dissertation on the use of 'the' in English, which might be helpful. Strunk and White was not so helpful.
