Use of the indefinite article before proper names
§ 201. The indefinite article is necessary:
1. When the person mentioned belongs to the family bearing the same name:
Mrs Tulliver had been a Miss Dodson...
No daughter of the house could be indifferent of having been born a Dodson, rather than a Gibson or a
Watson.
2. When nothing is known about the person mentioned but the name.
This usage corresponds to the Russian word «некий».
There’s a young American girl staying at the hotel. She’s a Miss Render.
3. When an originally proper name comes to be used as a common noun (usually as a result of metonymy or metaphor), as in:
This man doesn’t know a Rubens from a Rembrandt (pictures of these painters).
There is in Gary’s work the naturalness and zest of a Defoe, the generosity of a Fielding (like that of
Defoe, like that of Fielding).
Everybody isn’t a Mary Pickford (a film star like Mary Pickfbrd).
He was a Crusoe with no need to look for footprints in the sand (a man like Crusoe).
‘Have a cigar.’ ‘If it is a real Havana.’
4. When some phase, aspect, or state ismeant, whether it refers to a living being or a geographical place:
John was inside, a very different John from the lad he had known seven years ago.
And now here was Gulliver’s girl Barbara, that mournful-eyed waif from an unhappy France.
So at night Castle dreamt of a South Africa reconstructed with hatred.
(Compare with the same use of the indefinite article before unique and non-count nouns.)
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