Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for The New Criterion’s fourth annual Circle Lecture on September 29, 2022. Click here for an interview with Visiting Critic Joshua T. Katz and Executive Editor James Panero.
The first word of this talk is the. Boy is that ever an unpromising beginning. It may sound as though you are about to endure an academic lecture of the dullest kind. Once a Princeton professor, always a Princeton professor, you may be thinking. Moreover, the observation about the rhetoric of my first sentence smacks of the postmodern obsession with self-referentiality. There’s only so much a reader of The New Criterion should wish to take of any of this.
And yet. The word the, which gives definitude to the title of our monthly review of choice, is truly fascinating. I could speak about it for the whole hour. Don’t worry, I won’t. But I find myself unable simply to let go of the definite article, and I hope you will allow me to tell you some things about this word, so small, so seemingly uninteresting with its one syllable, two sounds with two possible pronunciations (“thuh” and “thee”), and three letters. Short and not very sweet, you are saying to yourself, but the harmless drudges at the Oxford English Dictionary propose that it has twenty-three principal meanings, and so its entry covers rather more intellectual ground than most people would expect.
