Comment by rawling
14 hours ago
I'm going to the bank, the shop, the dentist, the pool - I have a regular one in mind and you may well also know which one I mean.
I'm going to a bank, a shop, a dentist - I've found a new one and I may well be about to describe it to you.
"A nice evening" - there have been ones before, there hopefully will be again, this was one of them.
Sure, but that’s different from “you do/don't care which one”.
“Care” may not be the correct word, but in those examples the difference is whether you are referring to a specific instance, or any instance of a group. When you say “I went to the doctor,” you did in fact go to a specific doctor (or “I will go to the doctor” meaning you will go to one). It would be equally valid to say “I went to a doctor”, it’s just less specific.
I believe it is food for thought — would one ever say "this was the nice evening"?
Here it only sounds OK if you make the adjective stronger ("this was the nicest evening", though you'd probably avoid "nice" in this case and go with "best", "most amazing"...), or drop the adjective altogether ("this was the evening").
So nuance is that you might have many nice evenings, with this being one of — but what if you do not, and all are actually terrible except for this one? I guess with proper pronounciation of "THE nice", it can still work (we already talked about nice evenings and not-nice ones, so it'd be "this was the nice one"), but it'd be pretty awkward.
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Well, on that note: the construction “I went to the store” has always felt wrong to me as a native speaker. People say it even when that store lacks definiteness in context (ie the listener has no reason to know which one you mean). At the very least, it counts as a separate usage of “the” that doesn’t follow the usual pattern, like when you say “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”.
Edit: Here's a frustrating HN thread where someone tried to claim it makes sense, but it turned out his argument hinged on "well obviously all native English speakers regularly go to some store, right?" Screw the homebound.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32620015
Looking at: https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/english-language/definite...
I think the usage falls into this group: "The first group consists of nouns which refer to shared knowledge of the situation or context...",
When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to. Friends and neighbours would have also have known up to fairly recently, when people still mostly walked for groceries and such to the few small stores nearby and made friends with people who lived close.
So, I'd say it's a bit of a colloquial hold over from walking times and construction taking a listener into confidence.
>When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to.
But again, people use this even when I have no reason to know which store they went to.
I’m not necessarily saying they should stop doing this, but it’s clearly not the usual kind of definiteness implied but the use of “the”.
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