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Dib Posted 12 years ago
Grammar

true bulies are/the true bullies are

Dear teachers

I want to talk about real bullies in general and don't have any specific bullies in my mind:

Everyone has bullying tendencies, but the true bullies are addicted to the sadistic pleasure derived by inflicting pain on the defenseless.

vs

Everyone has bullying tendencies, but true bullies are addicted to the sadistic pleasure derived by inflicting pain on the defenseless.

Am I correct to assume that both are correct but have different meaning:
In the first sentence "the" specify breed/type/kind/group of bullies( for example there could be true bullies, weak bullies, strong bullies, wannabe bullies etc in the universe) so here the can be used  to emphasis the type even if you don't have any image of bullies in our mind and are not talking about bullies that we personally know or have heard of.

In the second sentence we did not use "the" because we are talking about all true bullies in the universe and don't want to put emphasis on what kind of bullies they are

Is my logic correct?

Thanks in advance!
  

Top answer

vsEveryone has bullying tendencies, but true bullies are addicted to the sadistic pleasure derived by inflicting pain on the defenseless. There is no difference in meaning to me.

— AlpheccaStars

  • vsEveryone has bullying tendencies, but true bullies are addicted to the sadistic pleasure derived by inflicting pain on the defenseless.
  • There is no difference in meaning to me.
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8 Answers
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DibEveryone has bullying tendencies, but the true bullies are addicted to the sadistic pleasure derived by inflicting pain on the defenseless.vsEveryone has bullying tendencies, but true bullies are addicted to the sadistic pleasure derived by inflicting pain on the defenseless.
There is no difference in meaning to me.
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Thank you ma'amSo my logic was wrong? Emotion: sad
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I separated "Thank you ma'am" and "so my logic was wrong?:("like:Thank you ma'amSo my logic was wrong? Emotion: sadIs there a bug in this forums s
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I have found that sometimes if there is no punctuation, but phrases join. That may be the case here.
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PhilipI have found that sometimes if there is no punctuation, but phrases join. That may be the case here.
I separated them as paragraph. By hitting the enter key on my keyboard.

Strange things happened in this thread as well:

That I created many months ago, where every thing between brackets was being edited out. I got paranoid about it and
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DibThank you ma'amSo my logic was wrong?
I think you are over-analyzing a case where the use of the definite article is optional. Sometimes it does make a difference, but not in your sentence.
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DibI separated them as paragraph. By hitting the enter key on my keyboard.
I looked at the HTML of your post. There was no "Enter key" registered. This is not the normal situation with the site software. There may be an issue with your keyboard or browser. The site did not "see" a paragraph marker (usually the "Enter" key) in your post.
There are special
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Dib every thing between brackets was being edited out.
There are a few special symbols that are interpreted by this editor as commands rather than printed as they are typed. For example, if you put a hyphen before and after some text, the text will be struck out. You are probably running into this kind of thing.

- with spaces -
withoutspace
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