Lori Falce: Staking a claim for the word "the"

For years, former president Bill Clinton has been the butt of jokes about his cagey answer in grand jury testimony in which he showed his lawyer stripes and true politician colors by parsing the definition of the verb “to be.”

“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he said.

That was a lot of weight to put on two letters. Is, after all, is one of the most common words in the English language. Third person, present tense of that “to be” phrase. Get through a day without using it. I dare you.

And yet on Wednesday, Clinton’s crown for the most gall regarding a tiny word was stolen shamelessly by Ohio State.

The university has been chasing a trademark for the word “the” since 2019.

That’s right. The. Indisputably the most common English word. According to the BBC, out of every 100 words used in English, five of them are the word “the.” I’ve used it 15 times in this column already.

The is an article — a minuscule part of speech that refers to just three words that are really, at their heart, just adjectives. A, an, and the. A and an are indirect articles. They define an object as any one of a large group of something. Give me an apple, for instance. The is the only direct article, indicating a specific item.

In this case, Ohio State has made a comical case for years of being THE Ohio State University. Watch football on Saturdays in the fall and you will see various players bark out their names and school with an audibly underlined emphasis on the “the.” It began decades ago as an attempt to distinguish Ohio State not from other Ohio schools but from other colleges using the OSU initials — such as Oregon and Oklahoma.

Like all trademarks, it’s all about branding. That makes it no less ludicrous to attempt to plant a flag on the most frequently used word in your language. And I say that with full knowledge that my alma mater has a trademark on the phrase we bark out in a similar fashion, “We are …” followed by the rousing response of “Penn State!”

Yes, the rivalry is part of what has me rolling my eyes so hard I’m giving myself a migraine as I type this. I admit it.

But bigger than that is what it represents beyond the Buckeyes’ use. A trademark is a legal claim to the use of something, an acceptance that there is an undeniable tie to a word or phrase or image that could damage the brand if not defended.

Bayer didn’t zealously defend its 19th-century wonder drugs’ names, and now aspirin and heroin are both common nouns. Escalators. Zippers. Kerosene. They were all trademarked names at one point.

The difference between them and “the” is that they were created. Escalators escalated you, and the Otis Elevator Co. built the word for its new invention in 1900.

Ohio State didn’t invent “the.” It just invented the italicized shout of it at the beginning of the school’s name.

The words we use are more than property, especially in these basic building blocks. They are the way we communicate, the way we share, the way we mourn and hope and plan. Language is the most fundamental tool of civilization — a way to move thoughts and feelings from one person to another.

To take the most common word in our language and claim it like shouting “shotgun!” to get the front passenger seat is not in keeping with the sharing of knowledge that is more important to a university’s mission than marketing.

But maybe that depends on what my definition of important is.