Ultimate Pet Peeve - the word 'THE' in alphabetical listings . . .

bellevuecoug

SatelliteGuys Pro
Original poster
Aug 14, 2013
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Earth
To Whom It May Concern,

Every box I have ever owned from Dish has tried to tell me that, when sorting by alphabetical order (On Demand listings, searches, even my own recordings list on DVR), a movie or show starting with 'THE' belongs with the "Ts" . . . .

How basic can it be for Dish to insert an 'ignore' function for 'THE' if it is the first word?

Do I need to call my 2nd grade teacher and tell her no, she had it wrong - 'THE' counts when we sort alphabetically. Dish is straightening us all out. (Same with 'A' and 'AN', etc.)

Thanks. That is all.
 
Haha !! Yeah, it makes it fun 'cause there's probably a dozen or so events that start with "The...". At IMDB, if you search "the" and only in "feature films", you get 35k results. Granted, not all start with "the", i.e. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
 
Wow - The Band would really be unhappy to know they crossed your 2nd Grade teacher :eek:
 
It is an annoying problem and it is not limited to Dish. Other services seem to hit and miss. Sometimes you see a bunch in the Ts with other movies starting with The in the proper place, so you end up looking in two places.
 
Do I need to call my 2nd grade teacher and tell her no, she had it wrong - 'THE' counts when we sort alphabetically. Dish is straightening us all out. (Same with 'A' and 'AN', etc.)
Rules are made to be broken. How you Sort titles is not hard and fast. It is recommended that titles like Les Miserables be sorted by the first word (Les) as it is "intrinsic" to the name.

Similarly, a title like The Thing or The End would get similar treatment.

If you find yourself saying the title without the preceding article (i.e. Secret Life of Walter Mitty) then it isn't "intrinsic".

I'd like to pose the title The Hobbit to the style people and see what happens. I personally lean towards placing it in the T section.
 
Many times "the" is actually part of the name. It's not Avengers for the TV show, it's The Avengers... Avengers is a comic book. (Formal name is The, but more commonly Avengers)
 
Librarians decided years ago that if all the "The" titles were filed under T the T drawer (or A) would overflow. So, the rule was made that the first significant word is used for alphabetizing. The "A" and "An" words are treated the same as the "The" word and ignored as the first words of titles.
 
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