Every time I’ve gone out this week I’ve encountered this poster advertising The Final Destination, the fourth and latest installment in the popular teen horror movie franchise.   Now, I haven’t really paid much attention to any installments of popular teen horror movie franchises since I was about – well – twelve, but this poster really caught my eye.  It had nothing to do with its macabre imagery, its (not one, but two) toe-curlingly bad taglines or its tantalising promise of GLORIOUS, EYE-POPPING 3D (at selected theaters, see local press for details).   No, it was something altogether less obvious.  Something that was actually hidden in the title of the film.

It was the word “The”.

Over the past decade, the motion picture industry seems to have turned its back on the humble definite article:  Hollywood, it seems, has fallen out with the word “The”.   If you don’t believe me, then just look at some of  the remakes that have rolled off the Dream Factory’s production line in recent years.   Films that formerly had a ‘The’ at the top of their titles have been reworked, rebranded and stripped of their definite articles.  When Steven Spielberg updated HG Welles’ The War of the Worlds in 2005, for instance, he dropped the ‘The’ and simply called it War of the Worlds.   So, too, did the various filmmakers responsible for the remakes of The Poseidon Adventure (2006′s Poseidon), The Flight of the Phoenix (2004′s Flight of the Phoenix), The Mean Machine (2001′s Mean Machine) and even The Bad New Bears (2005′s Bad News Bears).

Television’s been guilty of this, too.  The recent ‘reimagining’ of 70s slo-mo superhero The Bionic Woman was called, you guessed it, Bionic Woman.  Maybe the programme makers felt that it would take more than Zoe Slater from EastEnders to distance it the Lindsey Wagner original.  ‘This isn’t your momma’s Bionic Woman!’ they urged, with a note of desperation in their voices.  ‘Watch, as we ruthlessly strip away all those layers of 1970s kitsch… those Age of Beige signifiers like bell-bottom trousers, Formica furniture and the word “The”.’

It’s no wonder their show got cancelled.

Why do these people do this?  What’s wrong with the word ‘The’, anyway?   Many of my favourite films, bands and books have had a ‘The’ in their title.  It all sounds like focus group folly and marketing voodoo to me, but maybe I’m being too harsh.  Maybe the film and programme makers are just trying to create some kind of implication of urgency in their titles.  In that sense, then, maybe this is just a modern variation of that long since fallen-out-of-favour fad of sticking an exclamation mark at the end of a movie title.  Films like John Wayne’s McLintock! Blaxploitation sequel Shaft’s Big Score! Hammer’s Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! and – God bless it – Airplane! were movie titles that seemed to shout, scream and holler for your attention.  They were nothing if not emphatic.  That sort of brazen use of punctuation may seem rather clumsy to modern sensibilities, but is it any different to way in which modern Hollywood likes to send its nouns out unaccompanied?  If that’s the case, then Ang Lee’s Hulk is no less grammatically gratuitous than Faster Pussycat!  Kill!  Kill!

Personally, I blame it all these definite article abandonment issues on James Cameron.  The first time I noticed a conspicuously missing ‘The’ was with his 1997 mega-smash, Titanic.  Prior to that, as far as I can remember at least, the titular ship was always referred to as ‘The Titanic’, but throughout Cameron’s film it was constantly referred to as ‘Titanic’.  (“You can be blasé about some things, Rose, but not about Titanic”;  “The press knows the size of Titanic. Now I want them to marvel at her speed [...] This maiden voyage of Titanic must make headlines!”;  “From this moment on, no matter what we do, Titanic will founder.”)   As I watched the film – lo, all those many years ago – I found this all rather distracting.  ‘Why aren’t they calling it The Titanic?’ I asked.  ‘What’s Cameron got against ‘The’?  Has he become Thephobic?  Was The Abyss to blame?’  This semantic incongruency prevented me from connecting with the whole tragic romance at the heart of the film, but it didn’t seem to negatively impact the film’s box office takings.   I guess grammar doesn’t have the same clout as it used to.

I’m no Titanicologist, though, so maybe I got it wrong.  Cameron famously went to great lengths (and, literally, great depths) to research the film.  Maybe contemporaries did refer to it as ‘Titanic’, and maybe I’d been influenced by subsequent generations’ corruption of the name.

But I doubt it.  The ill-fated Star Trek series Enterprise, for instance, wasn’t called The Enterprise.  During the episodes I watched (which, I must admit, wasn’t many) the titular ship was always referred to as Enterprise.  No ‘The’, just ‘Enterprise’.  Now, I may not be a Titanicologist, but I do know a thing or two about Star Trek.  Captain James T. Kirk always referred to his ship as The Enterprise -  as, too, did his successor, Jean Luc Picard – but the creators of Enterprise chose to ignore the combined wisdom of these illustrious veterans of franchised space drama.   It’s no wonder their show got cancelled, too.

Maybe The Final Destination represents the first signs of a backlash against this annoying trend.  If so, then it can’t come soon enough.  After all, there are times when a noun shouldn’t be allowed out unaccompanied.  Then again, knowing Hollywood, the pendulum will probably swing too far in the opposite direction.  We’ll probably end up with a veritable cavalcade of ill-considered remakes featuring the indiscriminate use of the definite article.

After all, none of us want to end up watching The Casablanca, The Chinatown or The Citizen Kane…

George Carlin was part of a very fine and very respectable American tradition – that of the painfully funny and dangerously smart freethinking foul-mouth. Many of my heroes belonged to this tradition, and it seems like most of them are now dead. Comics like Carlin and Bill Hicks – and writers like Robert Anton Wilson – didn’t just tell jokes or write comedy, they moulded neuro-linguistic smart bombs with a time-delay fuse, designed to perplex you for months or even years as you find yourself thinking hard about why you laughed so hard in the first place.

Carlin wasn’t that well known in the UK, but I couldn’t help but notice how a lot of the mainstream local coverage of his death has been somewhat coy and evasive. The BBC News website announced that:

“Grammy-award winning comedian George Carlin, best known for his Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV routine, has died of heart failure aged 71.”

The story said quite a lot about his most infamous monologue. It mentioned how “his Seven Words routine led to his arrest in 1972 for disturbing the peace after he performed the act at a show in Milwaukee.” It also told the famous story of the New York radio station that played a recording of the Seven Words, which resulted in “a Supreme Court ruling in 1978 upholding the government’s authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language.”

The one thing the BBC didn’t mention is what the Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV actually were.

Would you like to know what they were?

George Carlin’s Seven Forbidden Words were shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.

I first read about this in the late Robert Anton Wilson’s excellent book, Quantum Psychology. In it, he devotes a chapter to Carlin and the neurolinguistic hallucinations we associate with “bad” language. Like much of Wilson’s work, it’ll make you laugh like an idiot.

It’ll also perplex you for months.

All that talk in my previous post about meaningless corporate jargon reminded me of an incident that happened some years ago, whilst I was working for that aforementioned company that was so prone to wholesale crimes against language.

At one point in the early 2000s, a phrase that was doing the rounds in the business world was ‘sanity check’. According to Wikipedia:

“A sanity test or sanity check is a basic test to quickly evaluate the validity of a claim or calculation. In mathematics, for example, when dividing by three or nine, verifying that the sum of the digits of the result is a multiple of 3 or 9 (casting out nines) respectively is a sanity test.

“In computer science it is a very brief run-through of the functionality of a computer program, system, calculation, or other analysis, to assure that the system or methodology works as expected, often prior to a more exhaustive round of testing.”

Well, despite the fact that – to the best of my knowledge – none of us were mathematicians or computer scientists, the phrase ‘sanity check’ quickly infected the local semantic environment. I assume it meant “carry out checks to make sure something works”, but that probably didn’t sound cool or important enough. Just as there are waitresses who dream of becoming actresses, I guess there are business people who fantasise about becoming mathematicians or computer scientists. Good for them, I say.

In any case, it wasn’t long before ‘sanity check’ variations found their way into just about every meeting, briefing or presentation I was unlucky enough to attend. On one such occasion, myself and some colleagues were getting debriefed on some fab new system or other that was about to be implemented across the business. It was being held by a senior member of the management team, a middle-aged woman from a non-technical background who found it hard to keep up to date with corporate jargon. That’s not a put-down, by the way. I’m a middle-aged man from a non-technical background who finds it hard to keep up to date with anything.

To be fair, though, she made a valiant effort. The presentation was generously littered with variations of this fashionable phrase. Things like: “Obviously, we’ll need to sanity check that,” “We carried out a thorough sanity check” and “The sanity check was vigorous.” But each time she’d say it, there was a weird reaction in the room. Murmurs initially, but soon escalating into schoolboy snickering. I could see she was getting perplexed.

Eventually, someone decided to put her out of her misery. He stepped up to her and whispered helpfully in her ear: “It’s ‘sanity check’, not ‘sanitary check.’”