The

Do you pronounce it “thuh” or do you pronounce it “thee”? Does thinking about it too hard give you the same squirmy feeling that it gives me? Repeat after me: the deceased, the inevitable.

When a yoga instructor gives cues that feel weirdly depersonalized—align the head directly over the top of the spine—I’m like, Wait, whose head? Whose spine?

Have I missed my chance to get in good with the in-crowd?

If one were the kind to get a literary tattoo, a good one might be the barred thorn, Old English abbreviation for “the.”

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Am I doing the work? What’s all the fuss?

A function word with a lot of functions: to indicate that a following noun is definite or has been previously specified by context or circumstance, to indicate that a noun is a unique member of its class. Put the cat out. Assassinate the President. Pray to the Lord. Visit the Alps, the Sahara, the Hebrides.

I challenge you to a race, from here to the daffodil with the little egg-yolky face.

Whence the convention of some bands taking “the” but others leaving it? Eagles and Talking Heads were initially article-free, though nobody’d ever try to make The Led Zeppelin happen.

I got my undergrad degree from GW. Excuse me, from The George Washington University.

I do have a fondness for bands with “the” in their name: the Replacements, the Clash, the Pixies, the Cure, though I’m ambivalent about The The.

Indefinite versus definite—how do we decide? “I don’t give a fuck” versus “Get the fuck out”? The basket of fucks to give sits empty.

Who around here is the adult in charge? What do you mean it’s me?

Elvis has left the building, but we are none the wiser. What’s the matter? Seize the day. The sooner the better.

“The” can refer to the singular or the plural. The company’s most overvalued asset is the CEO; the most undervalued is the workers.

Errata: my personal basket of fucks is a horn of plenty, an ever-renewable wellspring of endless fresh fucks. Maybe my tombstone can read: “Here lies the body of somebody who cared too much.”

The search to find the true self is a popular trope. Maybe that’s why “the” is a feature of so many nicknames: Mack the Knife. Catherine the Great. Jack the Ripper. The more the merrier!

Researchers have found that adults can change the five traits that make up personality—extraversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—in a matter of months. Just act as if you’re already the person you want to be.

The public internet was introduced in 1991: “Hello world, I’d like you to meet the Internet.” When I say “the moon,” I mean the moon.