The Gambia

True story:

I have a friend who is an ESL teacher, and one day in his lesson plans he reached the thankless task of having to explain the correct application of the definite article to proper nouns in English. 

Generally speaking, of course, we leave it off. The purpose of the definite article is, as one would guess, to define. Which is to say, to distinguish. To separate out. We say “I want the egg,” when we have just been offered a choice between an egg and a muffin. But we don’t say this when we really just want someone to run to the store and pick up an egg, and any egg will do.

Proper nouns, meanwhile, already differentiate. They distinguish and define. So we don’t need any definite articles in front of them. We say “The Pope” to signal that we mean this, the current pope, as opposed to any old Leo or John – but when we say “Pope Francis,” we’ve already distinguished him – we’ve boiled him down to one likely candidate – so we can drop the “The.”

“That’s why we say ‘I’m from Russia,’” said my friend the teacher to his class. “Not ‘The Russia.’”

Despite these clear instructions, however, one student in his class still refused to drop the definite article when speaking of his country. My friend corrected him several times over, and still the guy wouldn’t budge. 

My friend fumed about this. He explained to me the situation.

“Where’s the guy from?” I asked.

“Gambia,” said my friend. 

–

You really do have to wonder at the absolute rottenness of the luck of this. How many students have you encountered from The Gambia ever, let alone in a context involving the correct application of definite articles to the names of countries?

Literally the only other way in which this disagreement could possibly have arisen – and in which my friend would in fact have been wrong – would be if his student had been Bahamanian.