The “State-by-State” news brief pictured at right was in the
USA Today. Note I didn’t refer to the
newspaper as
The USA Today. For some
papers,
the is part of the official name,
and in those instances, it must be capitalized and italicized. Otherwise it
needs to be lowercased (unless it starts a sentence, of course) and set in a regular,
or roman, font, if included at all.
The
USA Today
blurb mentions my local paper, to which I subscribe. That paper is the
Connecticut Post. There is no
the in its official name. Need proof? See
below. Note the lack of
the.
When I was in college, the local paper did have
the in its name. I subscribed,
therefore, to
The Gainesville Sun,
not the
Gainesville Sun. Need proof? See
below. Note the inclusion of
the.
Sometimes
the is
right, then wrong, then right again. In the spring of 2014, a British daily founded
in 1754 restored
the after going
nearly half a century without it.
The
Yorkshire Post dropped its article opener in 1968, only to witness the
return of
the following a 46-year
hiatus. Why the change? As new editor Jeremy Clifford told Johnston Press:
“We are
THE newspaper campaigning for
Yorkshire. We set the agenda, identify the issues that concern the people of
this region and ensure Yorkshire’s voice is heard. … Reintroducing
the cements our position of being
THE
best place for news, sport, entertainment, culture, analysis, debate and
campaigning. Those three letters set the standard by which we will continue to
be
THE
national newspaper for Yorkshire.”
The. We give that ubiquitous
function word little thought. Its official inclusion (or omission) may seem inconsequential,
but accuracy is important. Do you read the
New
York Post or
The New York Times,
the
Los Angeles Times or
The Washington Post, the
Chicago Tribune or
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution?
See the difference?
The makes a
difference, and not only on a newspaper’s nameplate. Consider other mediums.
Movies
The Changeling
came out in 1980, but
Changeling
didn’t hit theaters for another 28 years.
Evil
Dead premiered 32 years after
The
Evil Dead made its 1981 debut. A whopping 64 years separate
The Killers (1946) and
Killers (2010).
Deep Blue Sea, a 1999 action movie about scientists battling sharks
at a remote research facility, and
The
Deep Blue Sea, a 1955 British drama about infidelity, are oceans apart.
Television
The Twilight Zone
ran on CBS for five seasons, from 1959 to 1964, near the end of television’s
“Golden Age.” No, wait.
Twilight Zone
aired during those five gold-specked seasons. No, no, wait. The truth is,
The Twilight Zone ran for the first
three seasons before crossing over into the
Twilight
Zone. For reasons as undefined as, yes, a twilight zone, the Rod Serling
series dropped
the when the fourth
season began as a midseason replacement in January 1963 for
Fair Exchange, the very show that had
replaced
The Twilight Zone on CBS’
1962 fall schedule after the anthology series failed to secure a sponsor for a
fourth season.
That
Twilight Zone
trim may have been the first example of television losing
the, but it wasn’t the only one.
Discovery
Channel, home to Shark Week, took a bite out of its name in 1995. Back then,
the cable station was known as The Discovery Channel. The head honchos,
however, figured that dropping the
from the network’s name would help the company’s expansion as a multiplatform
brand.
On March 20, 2008, The History Channel was history. In hopes
of eroding its image as a stuffy network offering nothing more than World War
II documentaries, the cable channel dropped
the
and
channel from its name. According
to executive vice president Nancy Dubuc, this, ahem, historic change was part
of a multimedia rebranding effort. “We really look at this as more of an
evolution,” Dubuc said. “People refer to us as History, and the listings refer
to us as History, and everybody refers to us as History. So we really just
wanted to keep the name in step where we were as a brand. And we really do see
the brand as all things history, and this evolution embraces that.”
Internet
What popular website was launched in a Harvard dorm in 2004?
Did you guess Facebook? You’re wrong, technically. When Mark Zuckerberg’s
social networking site began, it was called Thefacebook, and it remained that
way for a year, until the company purchased the domain name facebook.com for a
cool $200,000 and dropped its first three letters. My guess is that the world’s largest social network wanted to be known as
Facebook all along, but a bit of domain squatting prevented it. If you believe
what you see at the movies, Napster co-founder Sean Parker spurred the change.
At the end of his first meeting with Zuckerberg, Parker, played by Justin
Timberlake in
The Social Network, offered
the following advice:
“Drop the the. Just Facebook. It’s cleaner.”
Parker may have considered
the a dirty word, so to speak, but its level of impurity must be
measured on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes that definite article definitely should
be dropped; sometimes it’s a keeper.
That’s
the truth.
