The The, the The The, and The Who
In
my
last post, I mentioned the music group The The, which I
sometimes call
the The The. I
thought nobody else did, but I was wrong to think I was alone.
Note that the triple definite description isn't totally mad. For
instance, The The afficionados wouldn't bat an eyelid at me saying
my The The album, whereas
my The album is completely wrong.
In some sense, the first
The
of
The The is part of the
group's name.
It doesn't necessarily follow that you should refer to the group in
question as
the The The, any
more than you should refer to this blog as
the Language Log. It's just
Language Log. So plain old
The The also seems logical. But
the The The should come up
sometimes. First you could legitimately refer to my The The LP as
the The The LP that David owns. And
second, sometimes people do put an extra definite determiner before a
band name starting with
The.
It's hard to be sure, but I suppose that sometimes this is intentional.
Here are some Google examples (my emphasis added):
The opening exhibit will include music by the The Dunes, a Bay Area-based band
that plays a variety of North African Rai, Chaabi, and Berber music
combined ...
With music by the The Revolution Crew.
Video music by the The Notre Dame des Bananes Choir
from their 1997 CD "Ripe For Revolution".
The event will also
feature hors d oeuvres, a no-host bar and 50s music by the The Bendover Sisters of the
Silver Valley.
with callers Roger Alexander and
Marcia Minear and live music by the
The Good Old Way
At a press conference in New York City today, the The Who announced the details of
its new album, The Blues To The Bush
If adding an extra
the is a standard (though dispreferred) usage, it
should be no surprise if we sometimes find
the The The. And indeed the
MSN music site obligingly tries to sell us:
The
Singles Of The The by The The The
OK, so that one might have been automatically generated. But I also
found many others, including (my emphasis, again):
1961
Matt Johnson of the The The
born
One of the The The highlights is
"Armageddon Days".
I went to two of The The The concerts, one in Boston
at Great Woods
In my opinion the best of the The The incarnations.
May all the rest of the The The's lunatic fringe fill
your in box with rude words
Jumping onto the band name wagon with
another
post, Mark took issue not with the number of definites, but with
the capitalization of the prefinal one: he prescribes
the The or
the the The, and cites as evidence
the band's logo. Logos are created with artistic license, and not
necessarily intended as indicators of preferred usage, but still, I'll
admit this as potential counterevidence to my double capitalized usage.
But what, you may ask, does our friend Norma Loquendi have to say about
the issue? Capitalization of definite articles in rock group names is
quite variable, but Norma is pretty clear on this one. For many classic
bands with definites, lower case is mildly preferred, but for The The,
writers couldn't care less about the logo, and uniformly prefer
capitalization of the prefinal
the.
Here's the results of taking the first 50 Google occurrences of "Matt
Johnson of * The" where * = "the" or "The", and similarly for other
groups.
Search string
|
% the out of total the or The
|
Matt Johnson of * The
|
0
|
Roger Daltry of * Who
|
36
|
| Eric Burdon of * Animals |
60
|
Paul McCartney of * Beatles
|
68
|
Brian Wilson of * Beach Boys
|
74
|
Jerry Garcia of * Grateful Dead
|
88
|
For whatever reason, Norma dislikes
The
Grateful Dead, though she is quite fond of
the Grateful Dead. On the other
hand, she greatly prefers
The Who
to
the Who. And, like me, she
can't stand
the The. We are
both die-hard fans of
The The.
Or
the The The. Or even, as
in a couple of tokens above,
The The
The.
Posted by David Beaver at July 28, 2005 12:12 AM