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This image-stabilising system for a hand-held camera, developed by cameraman Garrett Brown in 1973, offers (...)

Wouldn't it be more correct to write "the cameraman Garrett Brown"?

Is omitting the "the" generally acceptable (outside newspaper headlines)?

RegDwigнt
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Glauber Rocha
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1 Answers1

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It is fine to omit the definite article here, and awkward to include it. The only reason to use the article would be to note that you are referring to a specific thing. In this case, since you are naming the cameraman, it is obvious that the specification has been made.

In fact, you're not really referring to "cameraman" at all: You are referring to Garrett Brown. "Cameraman" functions as an adjective in that case. And as such, you would not need to say the Garrett Brown unless there were other Garrett Browns who could be confused with this one, or else you wanted to call out Garrett Brown as being particularly important (for the benefit of readers who might not know how famous he was).

Robusto
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  • Thank you. I understand the rationale but I'm a bit surprised. – Glauber Rocha Mar 14 '11 at 16:32
  • I think you may be surprised at how often the definite article is dropped in spoken and written English, whether it is correct to do so or not. To me, overuse of the definite article is usually an indicator that one is a non-native English speaker. – HaL Mar 14 '11 at 16:38
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    +1 for "You are referring to Garrett Brown. Cameraman functions as an adjective in that case." Proper nouns are not preceded by articles in English. – b.roth Mar 14 '11 at 16:39
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    @Robusto: a quibble - I would not call it an adjective, as it fails almost all the syntactic tests for adjectives. It is however used as a modifier in the noun phrase, which is one of the two canonical uses of adjectives. – Colin Fine Mar 14 '11 at 17:46
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    @Bruno: "Proper nouns are not preceded by articles in English" ... except where they are. See the recent discussion at http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15484/using-the-definite-article-before-a-country-state-name/15534#15534 - in particular the sub-thread about "the X that ... ". When a proper noun is restricted or identified further in the NP, the article is permitted. – Colin Fine Mar 14 '11 at 17:49
  • @Colin Fine: A closer reading of my text would reveal that I did not call it an adjective. I said it "functions as an adjective" in the example, and that is not the same thing. I can place a violin onto a stack of papers to keep them from blowing about, in which case the violin would be functioning as a paperweight (until someone picked it up to play a piece of music). But that would not make it a paperweight, and I would still call it a violin. – Robusto Mar 14 '11 at 18:27
  • @Robusto: In fairness, the way a word functions syntactically is precisely the criterion by which one determines a word's lexical category, so Colin's assumption is understandable. A linguist would actually say that your violin scenario shows that a violin is both an instrument and a paperweight :) I think what we are seeing here is "cameraman" being used as a title, like president, officer, or CEO; by convention, we generally don't use articles in these sorts of constructions. – Kosmonaut Mar 14 '11 at 22:06
  • I've just come across this sentence: "As the historian Robert Furneaux Jordon memorably described it (...)". Would you call it awkward? Or just slightly so? – Glauber Rocha Mar 15 '11 at 06:44
  • @Glauber Rocha: Actually it doesn't sound awful there. But it would still sound better to leave it out. And to make things more interesting, if you were to say "great historian" you would definitely include the definite article: "As the great historian Robert Furneaux Jordon described it ..." English is funny like that. – Robusto Mar 15 '11 at 10:48
  • Here's another one: "The British journalist Andrew Marr, however, makes a slightly different argument." The made necessary by the presence of the adjective (British)? As opposed to: "Journalist Andrew Marr, however, makes a slightly different argument"? – Glauber Rocha Oct 08 '14 at 10:42
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    @GlauberRocha: The is not necessary there either. Most publications would simply render it as "British journalist Andrew Marr . . ." But the article could be used as well. – Robusto Oct 08 '14 at 11:02