The Woman Who Put the 'the' in 'the Gaza'

Condoleezza Rice evidently does not know her Huxley. If she did, she would not have referred on four occasions in her weekend interview with Jonathan Dimbleby to "the Gaza" - a mythical land that is neither the town of Gaza nor that political construct, the Gaza Strip. The more charitable may see it as diplomatic politesse - Jack Straw appeared to be about to say "the Gaza Strip" earlier in the interview but was interrupted in the middle of the phrase, and the US secretary of state may have thought "the Gaza" was a British usage.

There are two problems here. The first is that "the Gaza" is simply wrong - there is nothing in the Arabic to justify the use of the definite article. But there is also a curiously colonialist ring to it - the "the" somehow smacks of possession. As in "the Ukraine" - a usage adopted by Soviet empire-builders when the proudly independent Ukraine was absorbed in 1922. They thought that "the Ukraine" sounded like part of a bigger entity, rather than a country in its own right - which was just how the apparatchiks liked it.

But before we start fulminating about the crimes of communism, the British empire was hardly blameless: we came up with "the Sudan" - which conjures up visions of English public schoolboys in Boy Scout hats and ill-fitting shorts trekking across the desert. In the case of the Sudan, however, the "the" was justified by the Arabic "al" in front of the country's name. "The colonizers may have thought they were being sympathetic by adopting local usage," says Professor Robert Springborg, director of the London Middle East Institute, "but using 'the' seems very old-fashioned now."

Naming is such a minefield that the foreign office funds an organization - the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names - to decide on correct usage. The work is not perhaps always of urgent importance, as the "permanent" committee appears to have vacated its office for a fortnight, but, judging by its website, the only "the"s permitted are the Bahamas and the Gambia. Even Sudan appears to have had its "the" removed in these PC times.

But, when it eventually gets back to work, the committee has much yet to accomplish. Confusion still reigns over, and possibly in, (the) Lebanon. There is nothing in its Arabic name to support the use of the definite article, but references to "the Lebanon" are so frequent in English that even one of the staff at the Lebanese embassy in London thinks the "the" is correct until she checks with a senior official.

Usage, it seems, is everything. Which suggests that if Rice persists in hers, perhaps, eventually, she will get her way.