Silly question, perhaps

5 comments

1. Probably not the best answer, but your student is actually close. While “on TV” is more commonly used, it is possible to say “on the TV”. Which leads to the next point of, you absolutely do say “On the radio”. Probably has some reason why in English, we usually say “TV” vs. “the radio”.

2. Firstly, be really careful/try to avoid absolutism in language “accuracy”. Often times the reasons that the concepts of “correct” and “incorrect” are based upon are 100% arbitrary, were decided hundreds of years ago, and are completely disconnected from descriptive use in the population.

   This isn’t the case in this instance, but the “reason” why one utterance is incorrect compared to another could be that in 1782 Lord Farcewad the 3rd was upset with Lord Dandyweather for making passes at his sister, so using his influence within his circle of linguist peers Farcewad convinced them to write into their codices that the way Dandyweather says “Get on a carriage ride” is factually incorrect and plebian.

   Second, because grammar rules are arbitrary, numerous, and contradictory, it’s not reasonable to expect anyone but grammar experts and researchers to have a significant portion of them memorized with attached historically accurate reasoning. Students don’t need to know, officially, why we say on with or without definite articles, or why, exactly, we use on instead of in with regard to grammatical convention.

   If you can explain something logically, it may help students to remember what contexts require what prepositions, but prepositions take up to a decade of English study and use to acquire to a fluent/native like level. Explaining only helps if it’s logical or easy to remember, which most of grammar is not.

   Instead of looking for “this is why in English we say ‘x’ instead of ‘y'”, frame it as “I would say ‘x’ in this situation, I’ve heard some people say ‘z’ as well, but people almost never say ‘y'” This changes the discussion into a descriptive one, which is far more useful to the student.

   Lastly, to the actual situation, “on radio” isn’t always “wrong” depending on context, use, and intention. So we’d need the full context to even assess its accuracy.

3. As far as I understand, on tv is meaning a tv programme and on the tv is meaning on top of the tv set.
   On the radio is meaning both the programme and the radio set.

   Sometimes, it doesn’t work well. Eg. In a car, on a train. That’s what makes English interesting, and difficult.

4. In situations like that just say it’s not grammatically correct but it became common enough that it’s accepted. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up trying to over think something so you can provide an answer but every language contains many grammatical exceptions so it’s normal for something to have no good reason.

   P.S. I say on the TV and I am a native speaker.

5. Traditionally there was ONE radio and ONE TV in the house. So we said “the TV” and “the radio”. The real question here is why we dropped the “THE” in the case of television and not radio or Internet. I suspect that it is because it used to be physically possible to put an item on top of a television and this is how we distinguished the two situations.