Place Names Starting with “The”

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, how are you? My name is Brooke Barnum. I’m calling from Coronado, California.

Hello, Brooke. Welcome to the show. Hi. So I was sitting at lunch with my father at the retirement facility where he lives, and there was a gentleman that I had spoken with before, and I knew he was from New York, and I said, you’re from Brooklyn, correct? And he said, no, I’m from the Bronx. And did you know that the Bronx is one of a couple places where you have to use the word the in front of it? You don’t say the Brooklyn or the Manhattan, but you do say the Bronx.

And he said, and I believe the Vatican is another place. And I thought to myself, ooh, I’m going to have to call A Way with Words for this because I wasn’t sure. I’ve never heard that before. So I’m calling you to ask you about that.

Man, it’s true. There are only a handful of these, right? Countries, cities, where you use that definite article, the Bronx. Like it’s special, right? Like it deserves honors and awards, the Bronx. Not any old Bronx, but the Bronx.

Yeah, and it’s not as if there’s a hard and fast rule about it. There’s kind of a tendency when you’re talking about a name that has a history that has to do with a feature of geography, like a river. You know, we talk about the Amazon or the Gambia.

Yeah, like a topographical feature. Like think of the Hague in the Netherlands, right? The Lowcountry.

Oh, right, right. Yeah, the Hague comes from an old word that means hedge in Dutch and has to do with an area that was, I guess, surrounded by a hedge. Surrounded the court, I believe, where they met.

Yeah. Yeah, so they’re little echoes like that. And so with the Bronx, it’s called the Bronx because it was named after the Bronx River, right? Which was named after a guy whose last name was Bronx.

Right, who had a farm that was basically most of what today is the Bronx. Yeah. So his name, which was spelled differently, was changed to B-R-O-N-X, applied to the river. And then when they were looking for a name after they took that land from Westchester, which is just north of New York City, they decided to take the name of the river to apply it to the borough and thus the Bronx.

Oh, gotcha. Oh, interesting. But each one of these the places has its own story.

Yeah. And usually the tendency is to lose those. But, you know, we talk about the United States, right? We talk about the United States. We talk about the United Kingdom. But an interesting one of more recent vintages is Ukraine. You know, we used to talk about the Ukraine. But that term apparently means borderlands. And so that’s why it’s sort of a politically sensitive thing to say. So now we don’t use the definite article.

Right, right, because it’s a country in and of itself. Ukraine. Okay. Islands a lot of times, the Bahamas, the Philippines. My favorite of all of these, and it’s kind of going off track a little bit here, but it’s the La Brea Tar Pits, which is just so full of redundancies, it’s ridiculous.

Yeah. The La Brea Tar Pits. Oh, funny.

Okay. Well, good. Well, thank you. I love listening to your show.

That’s our pleasure. Thank you for calling us so much.

Okay. Have a great day. Take care. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Well, this is a show about words and language and anything to do with speaking and writing. Give us a call, 877-929-9673.