Talk:The

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The

"Alternative capitalization of the". Only according to the normal rules of first word of a sentence...? Equinox ◑ 18:10, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

And titles (of works or persons) or, possibly, for emphasis. I don't know whether these would be worth a lexical entry as its role in these cases directly follows from being The definite article. DCDuring TALK 19:00, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

An explanation of why I added it (but make up your own minds):- My method of adding words is to find a large online document and process it to produce a list of all the words that we haven't got. Guess which word is red-linked the most in every single such document. So I thought I would hoist it up the flagpole and see who tears it down. If it survives, I have no intention of adding more than a dozen similar words that are very common as the first words of a sentence. SemperBlotto (talk) 19:11, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Red links for invalid terms may be irritating, but of course, they're still invalid! Mglovesfun (talk) 19:19, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

• I'd like to see citations of The of the two kinds that I mentioned above.

We have had and may still have numerous inflection lines for which a contributor thought it was important that "the/The" be incorporated. Perhaps we should acknowledge that there is something special about such use of the/The not captured at [[the]].

I wonder whether The is attestably used in writings to indicate stressed the sense 8. DCDuring TALK 19:46, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

(After edit conflict, I think we're on the same thought here). Is there a case to be made for using the capitalised form as a means of emphasis. Or would THE be used. The example I'm thinking of is from "Wind in the Willow", where one of the characters was emphasising the qualities of their river and said something to the effect of "A river, this is The river".--Dmol (talk) 19:50, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

So far, I tried searching for "[is|become] the place to be seen". If found two capitalizations-for-emphasis, "THE place to be seen" and "The Place to Be Seen", not "The place to be seen", which is the only one that would have warranted lexical treatment of this use of The. It is a little tedious to search for this kind of thing.

Also in The Wind in the Willows, the passage shows:

'I beg your pardon,' said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. 'You must think me very rude, but all this is so very new to me. So - this - is - a - River.'

'The River,' corrected the Rat.

DCDuring TALK 20:06, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm working from memory here. What was the reply. Wasn't that where the quote I gave was used--Dmol (talk) 20:14, 24 February 2013 (UTC).

I've expanded and corrected the punctuation of the passage. There were two speakers. DCDuring TALK 20:27, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

The example of The River is capitalized only because it's the beginning of a sentence. The emphasis is shown with italics. [1]. --BB12 (talk) 03:40, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Right. That form of emphasis is already shown as sense 8 of [[the#Determiner]]. I don't know that we would want to show orthographic variations of the like The and THE which are meant to convey that sense without audible stress, but it seems worth considering. As we don't seem to like to write readable appendices on grammatical points, creating an entry might be the best we can do. DCDuring TALK 04:06, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I would exclude it even if it weren't at the beginning of the sentence, because it would obviously be the phrase that was capitalized, not the constituents. This brings up another point: this is an example of common nouns that become proper nouns by virtue of a very narrowly restricted context where the referents are the only significant ones of their kind. As a rule, we don't include those (except the Valley, and even there, there are other valleys where the residents refer to their' valley that way- the San Gabriel and Central valleys are two I'm personally familiar with). Similarly, people in the San Francisco Bay area refer to San Francisco as the City, New Yorkers refer to New York as the city, and people in England refer to London as the City. This shift from common to proper noun is completely dependent on context, and thus the source of huge numbers of senses. Likewise, capitalization can be used for emphasis on potentially any word or phrase that one wants to emphasize- do we really want to have thousands of "alternative capitalization" entries because each is used this way in three places? There comes a point where universal/infinite productivity means we have to ignore attestation and trust that people can figure this out on their own. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:31, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

• Delete. - -sche (discuss) 08:30, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Delete. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:59, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

• Delete per Mglovesfun: it might be irritating, but invalid is invalid. Plus, it will be detrimental to people who are used to typing words capitalised in search bars, as it won’t automatically redirect to the. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 23:43, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Delete.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:22, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

Couldn't nearly any word be capitalized for emphasis? DAVilla 05:30, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

deleted -- Liliana • 09:02, 10 March 2013 (UTC)