Although it is always ‘the pub’ never just ‘pub’. Why is that?
For the same reason that it’s ‘the hospital’. Most people have a school, have a church, have a town. If my sister says she’s going to school, I can assume it’s the school she always goes to. Same with church and town. However, there are a bunch of pubs, and people don’t always go to the same one – and a person doesn’t always know if their audience goes to the same pub as they do, if they do always go to one.
Perhaps the same is true of hospitals in the U.S. but not in the U.K. If I fall and break a bone, chances are that I’ll be going to the hospital in the town fifteen minutes south of me. If I need to have heart surgery or I get burned really badly, I’ll be going to the hospital about an hour (by car) north. I don’t have any allegiance to any one hospital. (If I was burned really bad, I’d probably go to the one south by ambulance, then to the one north by helicopter, but the basic idea still applies.)
So, do you u.k. folk always go to one hospital?