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Hi Alexander,

 AK>> If Miln had put it with a capital first letter it was rather a
 AK>> name.
 GH> It seems at first it was a denotation and a name at the same time. The
 GH> writer was introducing "The Piglet" as an "object" in the story in the
 GH> course of 2-3 sentences, and then it actually settled in as a personal
 GH> name.

Have you heard an idiom "Keeping up with the Joneses"?

As I've mentioned earlier, English articles are quite an interesting subject
to study per se, and speaking of it in regard to its usage with names and
proper nouns, here's some info that might help us:

======
More generally, using an article before a proper noun that doesn't have one
built into it (as the United States and the Rolling Stones do) is one example
of using a proper noun as a countable noun.

There are several reasons why we might do that normally. One is to say
something like "there are three Johns in the group", meaning "there are three
people called John in the group".

Another is to add distance to the identification; "I have a John Smith on the
line" is a common expression for "I have someone on the line, who tells me he
is John Smith, and that is all that is known about him". A similar is to
report, e.g. "One John Smith is accused of the crime", emphasising that we
have no further identifying details at present, and hence we are not stating
precisely which person of that name is the subject of the sentence.

Another is to use a proper noun as an example of particular traits that could
also be held by others (a type of synecdoche). "The next Bob Dylan" (a
singer-songwriter from the folk scene who will repeat Dylan's success), "He's
an Einstein" (he's very smart), "All Mozarts have their Salieris" (not really
true even for Mozart and Salieri, but let's say we believed the film Amadeus
was accurate).

Another, almost inverse to this, is to speak of the person or thing signified
by the proper noun at a particular time, or from a particular perspective:
"The London of a hundred years ago was a notoriously unhealthy place", "The
John you know is not the John I know" (that could also mean you are talking of
a literally different person, depending on context).

 The above are reasonably standard, though figurative.

Another common variation is to jokingly make use of these forms, when one
normally would not. If talking of a friend, we would generally use their name
as a proper noun, because that's how names work in English, but since every
person called George is "a George", and so on the form is logically correct,
though not strictly good English. To use it of a friend could suggest that you
have gotten as far as knowing it's a George, but not which one, or that
George's are all alike and you've hence found someone who will have all the
George-like qualities that George has. Both obviously are not sensible, but
therein is the joke. Another variant would be if you were looking for George,
and then spotted him. Again "ah, there's a George" would suggest that you'd
were just looking for Georges generally, which again is not sensible, hence
the joke.

All of these last cases are examples of deliberately bad English, used as a
joke, rather than something that would normally be considered correct.

[A completely different case is when there's a word that is the same as a
proper noun, but isn't a proper noun, of which some slang cases started as a
proper noun and are hence sometimes capitalised.]
====== From:
english.stackexchange.com/questions/104439/indefinite-article-and-peoples-names


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