Noncompositional

At the beginning of the Double Jeopardy! round of today’s Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek noted to one contestant, “Robin, I see red on you and red in front of you: let’s try to get rid of one of those this round.”

Robin had a negative score, and was wearing a red shirt. Thank goodness for specific indefinites.

In English, the is said to be the definite article, because when it is used there is a definite thing that is being picked out, while a/an is the indefinite article, as it just picks out one of a class of things. I can see the book if we both know which book I’m talking about, but I can see a book even if you didn’t even know we were going to talk about books at all.

But there are cases where an indefinite expression is interpreted as picking out a specific (a “definite”) thing. For instance, compare:

I want to get a bicycle. But I don’t know what features I want.

I want to get a bicycle. I saw it today at the used bike shop.

The first is non-specific: I just want to get something of type “bicycle.” The second is specific: I want to get a particular bicycle, or a certain bicycle (note the as).

Anyway, I think you can see where this is going. Either Trebek just wanted to reduce the amount of red in his field of vision in any way possible, or he was hoping that Robin would answer a few questions correctly. (Or, I suppose, he wanted to be a dirty old man and didn’t care about the scores.)

PS, Robin won the game after entering Final Jeopardy! with a little more than half the leader’s score.