Hiske Versprille, who in de Volkskrant writes about food, described it last Saturday. There is a group of newspaper readers who don’t like using English words. When she uses an English word, “mails on legs, signed with a snippy ‘Sincerely'” arrive immediately.
This is right. Those same people will find it horrifying what I am about to say: I think we can get rid of the articles. In fact, we’re already losing them, and we’d better be at peace with that.
My husband teases me that I regularly sound like a loitering teenager standing on a corner drinking an energy drink. For example, I recently said: ‘Yes, I know that store. It’s in Beethovenstraat.’
I looked up to it myself. But this is very normal among young people. You don’t say ‘Beethovenstraat’. You say ‘Beethovenstraat’.
At first there was already a tendency to no longer say ‘de’ and ‘het’, but only ‘de’: ‘the house’. But soon after, something more radical happened. The articles are often not even discussed.
With a blind test you can easily tell whether someone is under or over 40. If the person says ‘We went for a drink after work’ then they are over 40. If the person says ‘We went for a drink after work’ they are under 40. (Although people under 40 probably never talk about ‘have a drink’ – this actually sounds like something they did at the French court, pinky up.)
Although I initially resisted constructions such as ‘after work’, I notice that they also creep into me. And why not? Articles take up time and space for thought. There will probably be a scientist who will also send me a letter now, who can explain that the loss of the article means the loss of Western culture, or something. And I think ‘the’ and ‘the’ are fine words. But you can do without. You can say ‘after work’, and everyone understands that.
The strange thing is that omitting the article sometimes leads to something that is more grammatically correct. I’ve been talking about ‘de Blokker’ and ‘de Hema’ all my life, but that is not correct, I learned when I started writing for newspapers. You have to say: ‘I bought that egg cup at Blokker.’
I recently said: ‘I’m going to pick up the photos at Hema.’
My husband laughed at me again. I said Hem! And not the Hema!
But it was actually correct. And I went with the times. Although no one under 40 will ever have photos printed. But that’s a whole different story.