Re: CHAT: the gay Canadian (was: "have a nice day")

>Matt Pearson wrote:
>
>> Perhaps "the X" in this case means "the individual out of some
>> (perhaps unspecified) set of individuals who is identified or
>> identifiable by virtue of being an X".
>
>That rather begs the question:  the "the" in this definition
>suggests uniqueness, but "Matt the gay Canadian" does not.
Yes it does.  "Matt the gay Canadian" means "Matt the
unique individual in this situation who is being identified
as a gay Canadian".  There are indeed other gay Canadians
out there, but they are implicitly not being considered in
this context.  So "the gay Canadian" picks out a unique
referent relative to the discourse situation.  How is
that different from "the book"?  "The book" doesn't
mean "the one unique book in the world", it means
"the unique entity *in the present discourse context*
which may be identified as a book".

Need I add that I was using "Matt the gay Canadian"
facetiously, treating the property *as if* it were unique?

Matt.

P.S: On reflection, I think there are two possible meanings
for "Matt the gay Canadian", the second one being "out of
the set of all Matts under consideration, the one who is
a gay Canadian".  That seems to get at the function
of medieval epithets, used to distinguish "John the
baker" from "John the tanner" and "John the bald".
Either way, the entailment of uniqueness is unproblematic.