A Dictionary of Cont..

y a defining clause, it indicates a typical specimen
of the class, as in the rat is larger than the
mouse. Here the use of the approaches the use
of o, which means “any.” The words man and
woman are never used with the to indicate the
type, but any other word may be, as in she was
the perfect lady and he is always the artist.
Formerly the was used with the names of diseases.
Today we are likely to keep this the before
names that we associate with the past, such as
the cholera, the grippe, and to omit it before
words that are current today, such as rheumatism
and asthma. In the case of children’s
diseases we are more tolerant and may say
either the mumps, the measles or simply mumps
and measles.
The is dropped from certain prepositional
phrases, such as at church, on campus, in jail.
The rule is that the the is retained when one is
thinking about the actual place, object, or institution,
and omitted when what is uppermost in
the mind is the thing’s purpose or function. If so,
Englishmen must be more function-minded than
Americans, because they drop a great many the’s
that we keep. They say she is in hospital, we were
at table, he looked out of window. The last example
particularly interested Mark Twain, who
claimed that out of the window was one of the
distinguishing marks of the American language.
The is primarily an adjective and qualifies a
noun. But it may also be used to qualify the
comparative form of an adjective or adverb, as
in I like him the better for it. Here the is an
adverb of extent and is equivalent to “that
much.” (See comparison of adjectives and adverbs.)
The use of the before a measure term,
as in six dollars the bushel, is an idiom borrowed
from French. The natural, and preferred,
form in English is with the word a, as in six
dollars a bushel. (See nouns as adverbs.)
thee; thou. These words are no longer natural
English, but they were once in everyday use as
the singular of you. At that time thee was the
objective pronoun and thou the subjective. The
difference in the use of these two words can be
seen in the lines: Shall I compare thee to a
summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more
temperate. By the end of the sixteenth century
thee was often used in place of thou, very much
as me is used in place of I. This can be seen in
such phrases as I would not be thee and not so
blessed as thee. But soon after this, the plural
you replaced the singular altogether in natural
speech and later poets have used thee and thou
pretty much as they pleased. See also you; ye.
When thou was standard English, it had a distinctive
verb form ending in st, as in thou takest,
thou hast, thou hadst, thou wast. The s was
omitted in the four words art, wert, wilt, shalt.
Anyone wanting to write archaic English must
recognize the difference between these forms,
used with thou, and the old forms used with the
third person singular, that is, used in speaking
about a person or thing rather than to someone.
The old third person ending was th and it was
used just as we now use the ending s, as in he
theirselves
tuketh, he bath, he doeth. It was not used in the
past tense. One did not say he hadeth, he didet!?.
Neither the st nor the th ending was used in a
subjunctive verb form. That is, one said though
thou fall and though he fall. (The form is has
been preferred to beeth since before the time of
Shakespeare.)
When thee and thou were becoming obsolete,
the Society of Friends refused to accept the polite
or flattering you and kept the old singulars,
on the grounds that to use a plural word in
speaking to one person was unnatural, unreasonable,
and undemocratic. For a time the Friends
used the words thee and thou conventionally.
That is, thou was always the subject of a verb
and thee the object; thou was followed by the
old verb form ending in st, and was used only in
speaking to one person, not in speaking to several
people. But just as objective you drove out
subjective ye in general English, objective thee
drove out subjective thou in Quaker speech.
Eventually thee, like you, was used as both the
subjective and the objective pronoun. Unlike you,
it was always used with a singular verb. For the
last hundred years or so, it has been used with
the form of the verb that normally follows he or
she, as in thee is a good woman, Dorothy. It is
now the only form of address and is used in
speaking to any number of people.
their; theirs. The form their is used to qualify a
following noun, as in their home, their good
friends. The form theirs is used in any other construction,
as in friends of theirs, all theirs. Theirs
is also the form used in a double possessive
where it is separated from its following noun by
and, as in theirs and your affectionate friend.
Today this construction is generally avoided and
their friend and yours or their own and your
friend is used instead. Neither word order shows
clearly whether we are talking about one thing
or two, but the old-fashioned form, theirs and
your friend, suggests one thing possessed in common
more strongly than the forms which use
their.
The word their means “belonging to them.”
It must be distinguished from they’re, which
means “they are,” and from there, which sometimes
indicates a place and sometimes is simply
a functional word with no meaning at all. These
three words have the same sound, but they are
written differently.
In current English, the word theirs is never
written with an apostrophe. It must not be confused
with there’s which means “there is.” See
possessive pronouns. For the use of their in
speaking of a single person, see they.
thelrn is in use today but it has never been standard
English, although it is formed on the pattern
of hisn, hern, ourn, yourn, all of which were
once standard. The only acceptable form is theirs.
tbeirselves. This word is not standard. The only
acceptable form is themselves.
Theirselves is made with the possessive pronoun
in the same way that yourselves and ourselves
are. An older form, theirself, was once
literary English but it dropped out of the stand-