Board Thread:Help!/@comment-4139960-20130708231515/@comment-188432-20130710160711

That said, I still stand by the specific example of "the steward" in post 5 as a correct usage, as that's what he's called in-universe. Don't misread me. I'm not saying you should always use a instead of the. Certainly in the case of Steward (The End of the World), that's "the steward". He's the only one not only on Platform One, but also several others. In fact, I would argue that the s begs to be capitalised in that case. I think he's "the Steward", cause it's a title not just a job. Borderline case, obviously, so I'm not rushing in to change it, but if it were currently written as a proper noun, I wouldn't change that, either.

But in the case of something not unique — like a miner — you clearly wouldn't use a definite article. SOTO is, in my view, grammatically wrong above when he says that he'll just use the … whenever. No, you don't do that. Most of the time when someone is identified by a job — waitress, miner, secretary — you're obliged to use a, unless it can be established there's only one of that type of worker in a particular situation. There might only be one secretary in a small firm, for instance, or one teacher in a frontier school. You don't use the definite article just because that's the only one of that type of worker that we meet in a story, because using the definite article implies something that's simply not true.