>>54757843While "the" has valid uses, as I stated at the top of
>>54756123, what's more important is that when concentrated it develops an odor.
Like, you know, those people who, like, always stall for time with words, like, you know, like, and when they're talking and they know they've almost confused themselves, like, because they've said more than their pea brains can handle, you know, they, like, say, "You know?" like, they want you to bail them out with like, an acknowledgement that they've, you know, gotten enough across that they can move on, you know.
So oft repeated it becomes a distracting, irregular thumping noise that won't go away. Worse, that odor; it's the stench of TELLING.
(Inspect Pic Rel now.)
"But I'm SHOWING!" cries a panicked novice, "I was talking about THE silence/clearing/trio/sounds/forest/air/…"
When the author writes THE inappropriately, he exposes that he is TELLING what he imagines seeing rather than SHOWING the reader HOW TO ENVISION it.
Let's look at The Hobbit, p1 ¶1 line 1 (A good place to start is at the beginning.) and then skip to ¶2L1.
>In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.>It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle.Consider what a The Disease victim might write,
>The hobbit lived in the hole in the ground.>The hole had a door like a porthole. The door was perfectly round and it had a shiny yellow brass knob exactly in the middle.Again, The is only valid when the article is definite. We can't speak of The hobbit till we've been introduced to A hobbit. Or, The hole till we are introduced to A hole. ("Ground" is OK, because ground is ubiquitous and we speak of it generically. "The sky" is likewise always valid, unless we want to get specific such as "a blood red sky loomed ominously over the countryside that evening…", then we're definite and then we're Aing, not Theing.)
>style guideBeware! Some are penned by revisionists.
