Re: Article wierdness

In a message dated 9/11/2004 12:00:59 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
dragon@NETYP.COM.AU writes:

>"It isn't a bowl of lion's eye soup unless it contains the eye of a lion."
>This morning it struck me that it's a wierd peculiarity of English to
>use the definite article before 'eye' in that context. Lions, after
>all, have two eyes, so logic dictates that the article should be
>indefinite. However, when a part of a whole is an ingredient in a
>recipe, it seems that we use the definite article to refer to the part
>(this doesn't apply to measurements - it's "the eye of a lion", but
>it's "a cup of water").
>Is there a deeper layer of logic here? Has this phenomenon been
>studied?
It seems to me that similar usages occur in other contexts in English, and
also in other languages.

If I recall my French correctly, the usual way to raise "Raise your hand," is
"Levez la main" literally "Raise the hand," even though most of us have two
hands, so that perhaps "Raise a hand" would seem more logical.

In English, I see nothing peculiar about a sentence like "Some jerk threw a
brick through the window in my living room," even if in fact my living room has
more than one window (so that I could have said "a window").  This seems to
me to be essentialy parallel to the "lion's eye" example.

Doug

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