Caroline Taggart

He was a disinterested lawyer, and therefore uninterested in taking a bribe.

• for the major words in the title of books, plays, films, works of art: That’s Capital, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, The Catcher in the Rye, Casablanca, The Laughing Cavalier

• for proper nouns: James, Dad, the Queen, the President

• for place names and the names of buildings: London, Paris, Easy Street, the Taj Mahal, Buckingham Palace

• for adjectives derived from proper nouns: English, Shakespearean, Victorian

• for the pronoun I

• for personal titles that come before a name: Mr, Ms, Mrs, Dr, Captain, Reverend

• for most letters in words that are acronyms: NASA, NATO

• for the months of the year, days of the week, and special occasion days: Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Happy Birthday (but in the new year, his birthday seemed to come round faster each year)

• for brand names: Kleenex, Mars, Hoover

A drunk man

any old drunk man (he could be anyone – we haven’t mentioned him yet)

The drunk man

a specific drunk man (someone we are already talking about)

Bizarrely, however, when speaking in very general terms, the can be used instead of a to make something less specific:

There was a tiger in my garden.

an individual animal

The tiger is an endangered species.

that is, all of them

I bought a ukulele.

one specific instrument

I play the ukulele.

I can pick up any ukulele and strum away happily on it

Another way to make a statement more general is to use no article at all. This is sometimes referred to as the zero article and usually applies to plurals or mass nouns (see here).

Women are not good with maps.

Shorts are not suitable office attire.

Cats are thankless creatures.

Grammar is hard to learn.

In fact articles are a subdivision of a class of words called determiners, which includes possessive adjectives, demonstratives and quantifiers.

When used as determiners, they precede the noun in much the same way as the or a, but are used to differentiate between things that are near at hand (this, these) and things that are farther away (that, those). The nearness or farness may refer to time or space:

Does my bum look big in this dress (the one I have on)?

Ah, do you remember that weekend in Paris (back in the day)?

I have never seen these people before (though they are standing in front of me now).

Oh bother, if I had known those chocolates (the ones I have eaten, so they are now in the past) had arsenic in them, I would have left them alone.

Quantifiers are words such as no, none of, either, neither, any, both, few, little, half, etc. Again, some of these words may serve as other parts of speech (either or neither as a conjunction, for example, see here, or little as an adjective, see here), but in this context they go before the noun and tell us the number or, well, quantity of something:

Which of the contestants will I back? None of the above.

Neither councillor has any charisma.

Every one of the candidates is a crook.

It would be completely hypocritical of me to vote for any of that lot.

Half the problems of modern life can be blamed on people like that.

There is little chance of anyone decent getting in.

Do you think these examples are turning into a bit of a rant?

Common nouns can be further subdivided into:

Concrete noun: used to name something you can identify with one or more of the five senses, e.g. parsnip, smell.

Abstract noun: names something that has no physical existence, e.g. delight, failure.

Use fewer with countable nouns, e.g. five items or fewer.

Use less with non-countable nouns, e.g. less traffic than yesterday.