Belated reply re: "the" wife

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Someone writes:
<<Yesterday our laminate installer said he'd be on the job today "as soon as
the wife leaves for work." "The wife" has been around for a long time, but
has anyone ever heard "the husband" used the same way?>>

In a recording I made (sociolinguistic interview) I hear the following:

"The husband and daughter has a rabbit project up on the hill. How many's up
there, I don't know. I don't go up there. That's thars."

The recording was made in 1974 in the kitchen of the speaker's farm house
about 30 miles south of Asheville, NC. The speaker had lived in that same
county in NC all her life. This is the first reference in the conversation to
her husband and her daughter, so the "the" is not anaphoric. She only had one
daughter--and the use of "the" rather than "my" actually impliess that,
doesn't it?

Isn't this just the same sort of thing that one gets in an utterance such as
(I'm making this up), e.g., "I ws in a strange city and I went into a church.
The priest was an old man." This implies, to me, that there is only one
priest. For most most Americans, "the wife" and "the husband" are like "the
living room"--we only have one of them, and if we have lived with them for
quite a while, they become unique fictures of our environment. This is why
the Southernism "He's still in the bed" sounds so weird to me--seems to my
Yankee ears to imply that the house has only one bed. (But cf. American "He's
in the hospital.)