Alexg has got it right, in my view. However, since OP says he is waiting for someone to provide a generalized answer, here's mine.
It is hardly ever wrong to omit the article. "The Mall" is the name on the signs, so must be used: "Strand" (the formal name) is both awkward and confusing, so 'the Strand' is usual: most English towns have a few similar names.
Otherwise, there are many names that have developed from descriptions; 'London Road' is the classic example. Most towns in the Home Counties have a road that leads towards London, and refer to it as 'the London road'. Often, when street names were being given, it was named "London Road". In such a case, locals will often call it 'the London Road', while outsiders including the Post Office call it 'London Road'; I wouldn't say either was right or wrong. (Road is, in practice, the only term to which this applies: "the High Street" is usual, but so is "Church Lane is the high street in that village.")
Similar rules apply to stations, airports, roundabouts, etc. Bournemouth has a roundabout with a Frizzell office block, which everyone calls "the Frizzell roundabout". The council put up a sign saying "Frizzell Roundabout", so you can call it either. As far as I can see, all names with articles follow this rule: you can call what used to be Eastleigh Airport (the airport for Southampton) either "Southampton Airport" or "the Southampton airport". "The Southampton Airport" is not correct, but is an understandable mistake; if enough people use it, the name will change.
One last purely national point; in theory, you could refer to a railway terminus named 'Thingtown Central' as either "Central Station" or "the Central"; maybe this happens in the US. Britain has too many places like Exeter, where Exeter Central is a suburban halt, and the central station is Exeter St David's. (The explanation is historical.) So "the Central Station" would be highly ambiguous, and is never used.
In most languages indefinite articles stem from that language's word for one. For instance in French un, or in German ein, In Italian and Spanish uno or in Portuguese um.
English is no exception: an was derived from one. Note that an was the original indefinite article; the shorter a came later when the final "n" was dropped before consonants.
In some of the languages I mentioned above, the plural form of the indefinite articles is simply formed by applying the noun plural inflection: unos/unas or uns/umas.
In others, such as German and Italian, there is no plural form to the indefinite article. Italian use the partitive article degli/delle as a substitute and this is probably also the origin of the French plural form des.
For some reason English did not go through this last step either. To understand why we need to go back to the way Old English solved the problem.
In Old English adjectives have a different declension depending on whether the noun they qualify is determined or not.
"The glad man" reads
se glæd guma
whereas, "a happy man" is:
glæda guma
As one can see, only the adjective changes.
For one given adjective, you could therefore have different inflections depending on:
- the noun gender (masculine, feminine, neuter)
- the noun being singular or plural
- the four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative)
- whether the reference is definite or indefinite.
So that the same adjective would have to follow either the "definite" declension or one of three "indefinite" declensions.
þa glædan guman
Edit
<conjecture>
The theory I'm trying to check (community please feel free to edit) is that in various languages (Icelandic for a language very close to Old English or Romanian) the article is added as a suffix to the noun. Then it often "detaches" and passes in front of the noun. Icelandic is half way through for the definite article in that matter.
As for the Old English indefinite article, my conjecture is that the process never went through for a number of possible reasons:
- The "loss of inflection" of early Middle English won the race
- The plural of "an" was not easy to evolve at that time (the Romance "-s" plural had not imposed itself yet).
</conjecture>
But the need is still there, just as in any other language where a specific word emerged for the plural indefinite article. This gap is filled by placeholders such as some or a number of.
Most linguist agree that Proto Indo European did not use articles.
Latin does not have any kind of article, and Ancient Greek arguably had no indefinite article either - it was using something very much like present-day English some (τις - "a certain"). And I believe that Old German did not have any article either.
It is a very remarkable fact that articles appeared in many modern Indo European languages in a largely mutually independent yet very similar manner. My feeling is that their emergence compensates for the gradual loss of inflection in these languages. But then present-day German is a powerful counterexample...
Best Answer
As has been pointed out, the overwhelming form of the idiom is the blink of an eye. So there's no issue of correctness involved. The questioner, however, had some specific questions that deserve attention, since they suggest some underlying grammatical misunderstandings. Specifically,
This is not a function of the definite article in many situations. For instance,
even though there is only one right number, and millions of wrong ones, the idiom is always the wrong number. It's natural to native speakers, and always surprises us when we first notice it.
Articles, like other syntactic particles, don't really have any dependable meaning; they're just a convenient set of labels to attach to just about any set of things we might want to distinguish from one another. They have lots of syntactic functions, though: for instance, a predicate count noun has to have an article, as well as some form of be:
Only the first two sentences above are predicate noun constructions. The third is ungrammatical; and the fourth is an equative construction, with the doctor referring to some previously mentioned doctor (or, alternatively, to some social role he is acting out), but not necessarily predicating Doctorhood of him.
No, it's just rare. This question's been answered.
However, one should be careful about using the term "correct" in talking about grammar, especially English grammar, which is mostly syntax, and most especially when dealing with syntactic phenomena like articles.
Most ideas about "correctness" (and those are scare quotes) come from vague generalizations, while a great deal of fact is actually known about article usage in English. There are dozens of special uses for articles -- an applied linguist once told me he'd counted more than sixty -- and they mostly don't make much sense at all.
Why, for instance, is it The University of Michigan and not *The Michigan State University? Or The Missouri River and The Nile River, but not *The Lake Superior or *The Loon Lake?
No, not really. There is no "normal definite and indefinite article usage" in terms of "making sense", which is a semantic concept involving meaning, not a syntactic concept involving grammar. Grammar has nothing to do with making sense; grammar has to do with constructions and how they are used.