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Comment by allturtles | Hacker News Reader

I think this is just the way Shakespeare wrote, not anything specific to Macbeth's 'creepiness.' I was able to quickly find a similar example in Julius Caesar:

"Then he offered it to him again; then he put it by again; but, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time; he put it the third time by;"

Or Much Ado About Nothing:

"I have the toothache."

It is not surprising that the way (a way?) articles are used has changed in the last 400 years.

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I've heard the phrase "I've got the cancer". As if there's only one cancer to get, and everyone will know of it.

Then again, the English say "I'm going to hospital" where an American would say "I'm going to the hospital", so maybe the Bard used up all of the (how do you pluralize the??) so that the English use it less? At least the TFA author might theorize as such.

As a US English speaker "I'm going to hospital" sounds a little bit off in that British English excessively sophisticated way. But then I realized that most of the time if you're sick the main thing is you're going to the institution to get treatment, not trying to specify which location you are going to. Its almost like if we went around saying "I go to the school" or "I'm in the college" which sounds pretty dumb.

In that American English way, "I'm going to ____" has a different meaning if the following word is a noun or verb. So reading "hospital" as a verb really distorts that meaning. "How does one hospital?" In Texas, "going to" is pretty much always assumed about to go to a place where "going to" as in about to do something is solved by using "fixin' to" ;-)

It depends on the disease. You have the measles, or the mumps, or the flu, or a cold.

But isn't the article saying that Macbeth uses the word "the" more frequently than other plays by Shakespeare? In other words it is not the way Shakespeare typically wrote, and that difference gives the play a peculiar flavor

The statistical evidence shows that "the" is used more frequently in Macbeth, but the anecdotal evidence used to connect that fact to the play's spookiness relies on the idea that there are differences in the grammatical use of "the" that are specific to Macbeth.

The fact that "the" happens to be used more often in Macbeth than in other Shakespeare plays seems to me more likely to be noise with no deeper meaning.

Similar to the second quote, English speakers nowadays (at least where I live) say things like "I have the flu." In this phrase, I believe "the flu" refers to the ailment in general as opposed to what affects the speaker in particular. Maybe this is also the case with your second quote?

I have the coronavirus. I have Covid.

I have a headache and a toothache.

I have a cold and a fever. I have yellow fever.

I have a cough. I have whopping cough.

I have the flu.

I have the chicken pox, smallpox, the measles, and the mumps. I have rabies.

Why is this flagged; WTF is there to flag about it? The commenter obviously isn't claiming to have all these ailments at once!

They're illustrating how different diseases take different articles (or none at all) in standard English usage.

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