Is it ok without articles?

Question

In the films of those day, all too often it was the same one: boy tractor meets girl tractor driver; they fall in love and drive tractors together.

Question: Do you think the highlighted part without any articles is ok?

Thanks a lot!

BarbaraPA · Accepted Answer

Yes, in this case - because there is an idiom of "boy meets girl" as a way to describe a story.
(Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl make up and live happily ever after.)

But if you wanted to relate the entire story in a true narrative format, you would use the articles. ("A boy met this girl. He... the girl. They both...")

Clive · Answer

Hi GG,

("A boy met this girl. He... the girl. They both...")

Yes, yes . . . and then, and then . . . ? You're not just going to stop when it's getting interesting, are you?

Clive

Yankee · Answer

Maple

In the films of those day, all too often it was the same one: boy tractor meets girl tractor driver; they fall in love and drive tractors together.

"Boy tractor meets girl tractor driver" sounds sort of kinky.
Saying "boy tractor drivermeets girl tractor driver" would sound more "normal" to me.

BarbaraPA · Answer

A boy met this girl. They both had a fascination with grammar. The girl's family did not approve - he was from the school that did not use the Oxford comma. But she insisted it did not matter. Until the day she saw him use his red pen on a semi-colon; this was her pet punctuation mark. She was devastated, but agreed with her family that a relationship could not be sustained amidst such differences. Sadly, she bid him farewell. He tried to woo her back. He even sent love notes with deliberate errors, to give her the excuse to correct them and send them back, so desperate was he for even one simple note. Their mutual friend, who was a professor in computer languages, decided to try to win the girl for himself. Although she was fascinated by computer syntax, she was not fascinated by him in a romantic sense. She embarked in a new direction, computational linguistics, with him as her mentor in academics, but not in love. In the IT department, surrounded by programmers who called apostrophes "those floating comma things," and who rearely used its and it's correctly in their own papers, she realized arguments over the Oxford comma mattered not at all. The boy and girl were reunited. And although he never used the semi-colon himself, he reached a state of detante over it, with peaceful co-existence. The boy and girl lived happily ever after, with a quibble of children, all of whom pursued non-literary interests.

Yankee · Answer

I love your story, Barbara! <img class='emoticon' style='Width:19px;Height:19px;' data-delaysrc='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/2.gif' src='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/2.gif' alt='Emotion: big smile'/>

Maple · Answer

Grammar GeekYes, in this case - because there is an idiom of "boy meets girl" as a way to describe a story.
(Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl make up and live happily ever after.)

But if you wanted to relate the entire story in a true narrative format, you would use the articles. ("A boy met this girl. He... the girl. They both...")

Thank you Barbara!

[C]

And, wooooooo, what a lovely little story!

BarbaraPA · Answer

It's dedicated to Clive. <img class='emoticon' style='Width:19px;Height:19px;' data-delaysrc='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/1.gif' src='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/1.gif' alt='Emotion: smile'/>

Clive · Answer

Is it ok without articles?

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