WHAT THE

stop say that

I once had a job editing and indexing a directory of 1,100 U.S. colleges and universities. I got a note from the project editor to be sure to alphabetize The Ohio State University under T. Huh? Yeah, believe it or not, at the time, The Ohio State University didn’t want you to alphabetize under O for Ohio. They complained so much in previous years that editors knew to just relent and alphabetize the school under T for The.

Can you imagine being so fixated on the word The? I can. (So can the band The The. Never heard of them? That’s what you get for having two stop words as your name. They’ve the’ed themselves into obscurity.)

Fast forward to when I met two different women who happened to have participated in the Shelly Jackson tattoo story project, which enlisted volunteers to each get one randomly assigned word from Jackson’s short story tattooed, to make up collectively the only extant published copy of the story. Both women I knew happened to get the same word: the. Lucky break because when you see the the tattoo, you know there’s a story behind it. You don’t think it’s mystical word art. I’d hate to have been assigned a word with more meaning. Such as meaning.

Anyway back to the presumptuous, definitive the and how you can avoid being verbally obedient to a dominant minority such as religiosity, if you’re so inclined, as I am.

If you refer to “the Bible,” I’ll think you’re telling me that from your perspective, there is one bible. Then it’s my turn and I will do as you did: I’ll speak from my perspective: a bible. And if I were still an editor, my in-house style guide would include this instruction:

Not / Instead:

• the Bible / the Judeo-Christian bible; a bible

• the Word / a word

• the Lord / a lord

• the Ten Commandments / 10 Commandments