the motley fool stock advisor — and the importance of the article

the motley fool stock advisor begins with the word the. the article matters. without it, you have a service. with it, you have an institution. 4B starts the music early. mike, later, will not need the distinction. the article, on the page, does the heavy lifting.

thursday, 9:33am. parked at the workstation while carla runs the all-hands two floors up. forty-five minutes, maybe a little more if the projector hums longer than usual. nobody is checking on this screen. on paper i am, technically, billing the company for a paragraph about a definite article.

the only sound, downstairs, is a low thud through the ceiling. that is 4B. that is, on a thursday, already a story.

so. the motley fool stock advisor. four words, three of them ordinary, one of them — the first one — doing more lifting than the rest combined. i want to talk about that first word for a minute, because nobody else will, and because the all-hands has not yet ended, and because the thudding from 4B has, this morning, started before the second cup. it always does.

the motley fool stock advisor: a paid newsletter from the financial-media company named after the shakespearean court fool, offering monthly stock picks to retail investors. the article “the” in front of “motley fool” is doing serious work — it converts a brand into an institution, a service into a fixture. that, on inspection, is the trick.

the motley fool stock advisor, with the the

here is the part i want to defend, against the better judgment of, frankly, most copy editors. the motley fool stock advisor, with both definite articles, is not the same thing as motley fool stock advisor without them. one is a product. the other is a tradition. the difference between the two is one word that costs nothing to type and changes the room when you say it out loud.

this is not, by the way, a new observation. people who name things for a living have known about the the since at least the 1970s. the beatles, not beatles. the who, not who. you could argue, and i will, that the article carries a small implied phrase: the one and only. it is, etymologically, a brag dressed in punctuation.

so when the company puts the motley fool stock advisor on the masthead, with both articles intact, they are doing a small piece of branding theatre that i, on a thursday, with the 4B guy beginning his morning percussion above me, can almost respect. they are saying: this is not a stock advisor. this is the stock advisor. one of one. the rest, by implication, are pretenders.

(i have, of course, not subscribed. the subscription itself is a separate question i looked at on a different morning. but the article in front of the name — that is free. that one i can have an opinion on without spending a dollar.)

why the article changes the seriousness, briefly

let me put it this way. if a man at the corner bar leans over to me and says “i got a stock advisor”, my reaction is one thing. if the same man leans over and says “i got the stock advisor”, my reaction is another thing entirely. the second one implies a relationship. the second one implies, also, that there is only one. the second one closes the conversation. you cannot, having heard the, ask which one. there is only the one. the one is in the sentence already.

this is, for what it’s worth, the same trick that works on the word idiot. compare “i’m an idiot” with “i’m the idiot”. the first is a confession. the second is a claim. the article, in the second, promotes a generic adjective into a job title. i have spent, by my own honest accounting, more time than i should defending the second formulation. the distinction between an idiot and a moron, as i’ve laid out elsewhere, hinges on exactly this kind of grammatical seriousness. the moron, the idiot, the fool, the advisor — they all rise or fall on whether somebody puts a the in front of them.

the moron, in this house, gets the article. the article elevates. the article also, on a thursday, does the work of an entire marketing department for free.

mike at the corner ignored the article entirely

i raised this, at the corner, last tuesday. mike was on his second beer, which is the moment in the evening when mike becomes available for grammar. i said: “mike, do you say the motley fool stock advisor or just motley fool stock advisor?”

mike looked at me the way mike looks at me when i ask him grammar questions, which is the same way he looks at the IRS. mike has a system for taxes. he has not filed since 2019. mike is not, by his own admission, a man who places weight on definite articles. he said, and i’m quoting: “i don’t subscribe to either of them.”

which is, technically, a non-answer. but mike’s non-answers are usually smarter than other people’s answers, so i wrote it down on a napkin. the napkin is, somewhere, in my coat pocket. i’ll find it on a friday and not remember why it mattered. that is the system.

the larger point mike was making, i think, is that the article only matters to people on the inside of the conversation. if you don’t subscribe, you don’t care which one. if you do subscribe, you call it the advisor, the way people in cults call the founder the teacher. the article is a membership badge. mike is, on this read, correct. mike is, on most reads, correct. it’s annoying.

the 4b guy banged the wall during paragraph three

i should mention what is happening above me as i write this. the 4B guy (the_4b_guy, in my building’s filing system) has, since approximately 10:14, been giving an unsolicited concert on what i believe is a small drum. he does this most thursdays. he does not, to my knowledge, take requests. he does not, to my knowledge, know that the people below him exist. he is, in his own apartment, simply advising. on rhythm. on volume. on the question of whether the ceiling can hold.

this is, on inspection, the same dynamic as the stock advisor. somebody upstairs, someone i did not hire, is offering me guidance i didn’t ask for, on a schedule i didn’t agree to, with a confidence i find structurally insulting. the 4B guy is, technically, my unpaid stock advisor. his picks are: more drum. faster drum. drum at 10:14. drum during the meeting. drum during paragraph three. by his own track record, he is, like most advisors, fully committed to the strategy regardless of outcome.

i have not, by the way, complained to the landlord. complaining to the landlord requires the landlord to answer the phone. the landlord answers the phone, on average, one call in four. the math is bad. the system is not built for the man on the receiving end of the drum.

the stefan-type expert insisted the the matters

i ran the the-question past stefan, too. stefan is the friend who, at every dinner, has a wine recommendation he cannot pronounce. stefan was, on this, unexpectedly precise. stefan said the article is “the entire performance”. stefan said you cannot, in any serious wine list, say “a 2018 burgundy” the same way you say “the 2018 burgundy”. the second one assumes the table already knows which 2018 burgundy. the second one is the move of a man who is, on the merits, bluffing.

stefan said this with the confidence of a man who has been bluffing wine since 2017. but stefan was, in this case, right. stefan and the financial-media company are doing, in different rooms, the same trick. they put a the in front of the noun and the noun grows a small hat with bells.

(stefan does not know about this post. nobody at the dinner table knew either, including stefan, that the wine was an 11-dollar bottle. that is also part of the trick. the article elevates, the wine pours, the table believes. it is, in the cleanest sense, a partnership.)

the relevance to the motley fool stock advisor is that the same article is doing the same lifting on the masthead as on stefan’s wine list. they have, by adopting the convention, claimed a seriousness the underlying product may or may not deserve. that is not a criticism. that is just the math of definite articles. compare it to “boiler room”, the 2000 film about a stock-picking floor where every man is in a tie and nobody knows what they’re holding — the seriousness of the room comes, in part, from the language the men use to describe what they do. the article comes free with the costume.

the hot take, briefly, while we’re here

i am required, by the architecture of this post and by the fact that the all-hands has not yet adjourned, to plant a small flag on something unrelated. the small flag is this: pineapple on pizza is fine. i have written, in other rooms, longer arguments on this. i’m not going to repeat them. but the relevance, here, is the same relevance as the article. you can call it “a pizza topping” or you can call it “the controversy”, and the second one is, almost always, an exaggeration somebody else invented to sell newsletter subscriptions. the article inflates the noun. the inflation, sometimes, is the entire product.

the seventh microwave, in the kitchen at home, has not weighed in. the third yoga mat, under the couch since 2023, has a strong opinion but no audience. neither object subscribes to the advisor. neither object is, in this sense, a stakeholder. that is, also, the system.

verdict, the article is doing all the work

so here is where we end up, with the all-hands ending in approximately seven minutes and the 4B guy now, by my count, on his fourth distinct rhythm of the morning.

the motley fool stock advisor, the named product, is — as a product — a paid newsletter. that is fine. that is, by industry standards, a clean way to charge for a service. but the name of the product, with both definite articles intact, is doing more rhetorical lifting than the picks themselves. the name says: this is the one. the one and only. the rest are pretenders.

the trick is honest, in its way. they admitted in the brand name that they’re fools, which i respect. they admitted in the article in front of the brand name that they’re the fools, which is a smaller and more interesting confession. one of one. self-declared. on a masthead.

my own contribution to the genre, today, is that i’ve spent the last forty minutes writing about a definite article instead of attending the all-hands two floors up. carla, in the all-hands, has by now been served coffee. the 4B guy, two floors up in the other direction, has by now exhausted his repertoire and moved, judging by the muffled scrape, to either a chair or a drawer. mike, at the corner, will not be open until five. stefan does not know about any of this. the apartment, four floors below my desk and four floors above 4B in the wrong direction, is the only thing in this story without an article in front of it. that is, possibly, why i still live there.

all-hands wrapping. carla will pass the desk in roughly four minutes. tab will swap to the q3 deck. the q3 deck is the q2 deck with a different cover. that line is for a different post.