the

I was gonna write an entry that was more or less this, only not as good. Instead I will write about "the," that lil' dynamo of a word that can make words like drive, shot, and fumble take on the horrible, horrible meanings they have to Clevelanders, not to mention Akron-born Missourians who grasp at Cleveland sports teams in an always and necessarily doomed attempt to balance a perceived lack of hometown rootedness ("just 'cause you don't got roots don't mean you can't root, as my grandpa said," as I hope my grandson says).


The the I'm talking about, I am finding, is hard to define without showing up itself in the definition. I heard that's cheating. So I can't say "When something is the something, it's not just any something, but it's the something," even if you know just what I mean. Maybe it means the something in question is the most paradigmatic, the most representative, the most all-encompassing single example of an entire concept. Maybe it means the entire history of that idea was leading up to this particular realization, which isn't just the most perfect so far, but is that perfection itself. I bet if I knew more about philosophy, I could find names for these feelings. But forget it now, we can be lazier than that and just say "the" means what we all think it means when we say "the" the way I'm talking about using it.


It can apparently be re-applied to some things, so it doesn't necessarily bring with it any kind of singularity-- hell, Michael Jordan has two of "the shot" himself. But there are degrees of crowdedness in the hallowed lists of the's: Dwight Clark and Willie Mays are the only two duking it out in the big leagues for the catch, but think of the millions of people who, since 1990, have been purported, at least occasionally, to be the bomb, or for that matter, the man, now, dog. It can confuse your Itunes when some of those files are tagged Beatles and some The Beatles. I don't know which one of these internets hooks up my blog to your computer, but I know it's on the internet. I'm runnin' out of steam here, but there must be something to say about this: