Archive for the ‘language’ tag
“Fight in the Shade”
Example:
when Dienekes, a Spartan soldier, was informed that Persian arrows would be so numerous as “to block out the sun,” he retorted, unconcerned: “So much the better…then we shall fight our battle in the shade.”
Also:
…made in the shade…
…etc. Why is it that in English we have only one shade? Doesn’t matter what casts the shadow; countless trees the world over provide only one dark, cool place in which we can sit and enjoy a summer afternoon.
I wonder if this is peculiar to English, or if the same thing is found in other languages as well, and in what form.
The character of the phrase could be wholly changed by simply removing the word the and saying simply shade; such a variant would still (as far as I can see) be grammatically correct, and would not imply that, as Duncan McLeod would say, “There can be only one.”
But we don’t say it that way. No one says it that way. There are actually plenty of examples of this sort of singularity: the rain, the wind, the sun, the shade…
Who put that the in there, anyway?