Consider the virtues of the definite article in English, “the.” What a wonderful word!
We never appreciated this until we started studying Italian.
“The” is, of course, beautiful all by itself: a sturdy, little one syllable, three letter, word made up of two staunch vertical letters, T and E, joined by a vertical and horizontal letter, H. (Don’t get me started on H in Italian, which, for some reason they don’t explain, is not pronounced “H”, or anything like it, but, rather, “Acca”, and which is always completely silent, for very good reason: Italians are incapable of pronouncing it!)
But the incredible strength of this little word is its greatest virtue. Take, for example, its counterpart, the definite article in Italian. There are at least SEVEN of them splitting the work “the” does all by itself : “il”, “lo”, “l’”, “i”, “gli”, “la”, and “le”! (Who knows, there may be more that I haven’t learned!) You have no idea which one to use until you first look at the word it is referring to. Once you do that, you have to decide whether that word is masculine or feminine (NOT an easy task; in Italian beard is feminine, for example and bra is masculine), and singular or plural. Having figured all this out, you then have to examine that word and see if it begins with a vowel (which sometimes matters, and sometimes doesn’t), or an s or a z followed by a consonant, which also matters only sometimes. Having done this, you are ready to say something, unless the conversation has moved on to another subject, which it probably has.
So, next time you use our English “the” do so with appropriate respect. This little word does it all, again and again, all by itself, without asking you to think about anything.
Thank you, “the”.
ITALY, GERMANY, AND MORE! 
And now we see an example of why English, despite its ridiculous spelling and pronunciation “rules” and its redundant vocabulary, is today’s lingua franca.
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Good point, Bev. Like you and Joe, no doubt, we so often see people from different countries and cultures who are able to communicate, sometimes very well, and almost always adequately, using English. We’re hoping English is useful in Germany, where we go later this week as Karl has no German and Leslie Ruth seems to have forgotten much of what she learned at William and Mary when she was there with you!
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