{"id":3252,"date":"2014-04-16T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-16T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/drscience.com\/wordpress\/archives\/3252"},"modified":"2014-04-16T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-16T21:00:00","slug":"a-the-law-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/drscience.com\/wordpress\/archives\/3252","title":{"rendered":"A “The” Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"QuestionImage\"<\/a>  Why do people who write instructions always leave out the word “the”? As in, “attach door to wall using hinges provided”. Does the word “the” cost that much money to print in instruction manuals? <\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

———- from John Conery of Eugene, OR<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"\"  Federal Law prohibits even the necessary use of the articles “the” or “a”. Nobody’s quite sure why such a law was passed, but it would take time away from a busy Congressional schedule to do something about it, and heaven knows we have bigger fish to fry. Preliminary research indicates that the kind of people who bother to read the instructions don’t notice the missing letters. In most cases, their anxiety level, or as most describe “the noise in their head” makes most rules of grammar and syntax irrelevant. <\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"QuestionImage\"<\/a>Why do people who write instructions always leave out the word “the”? As in, “attach door to wall using hinges provided”. Does the word “the” cost that much money to print in instruction manuals?

---\u00a0Here's the answer from Dr. Science<\/a><\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-question-questions-submitted-by-dr-science-readers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/drscience.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/drscience.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/drscience.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drscience.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drscience.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/drscience.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/drscience.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drscience.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drscience.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}