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Comment by Joe8Bit | Hacker News Reader

Reasonable or not, it's a super widespread practice for marketing and PR departments to 'insist' on certain language when their products are referred to.

A super notorious example of this is Apple insisting/asking that their devices are referred to without any determiner like 'the' or 'an' e.g. 'We think THE iPhone is really important' to 'We think iPhone is really important'

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This one really annoys me because they’re asking people to talk like idiots so that people can stop and think for a second, “Is this person an idiot?” to generate more interest in their product.

No, that's not what they are after. They are after psychological influence. The removal of "The" cements the brand in people minds as the only one of its kind. iPhone is just an iota away from the generic term phone. These things seem miniscule, but when they are part of a large scale strategy they have a real effect.

The reality distortion field died with Jobs. That might be what they say, but it’s clearly a faulty logic. It would be an embarrassing case of self-congratulatory behavior if it’s truly the case that the marketing department thinks dropping “the” somehow transforms a proper noun into a regular noun.

a bit like when referring to a deity: 'I love god' vs 'I love The God'

In many non English languages it's common to say "the God" for the Abrahamic god.

That is, in those languages that have definite article(s).

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