My example would be the ubiquitous distinction between e.g. “plus vite” and “le plus vite” (i.e. “faster” vs. “fastest) or “meillure” vs. “le meillure” (better vs. best). The presence or absence of the article changes the meaning idiomatically. For me this is reminiscent of the large difference between e.g. being “shit” and being “the shit”. Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if analogy to the French were the origin of the “to be the shit” construction as a superlative.

Absence or presence of a determiner, and especially articles usually separates some constructions in all languages that have then (In English, it separate mass and count nouns, for example). This case, however, is more a peculiarity of English, or more specifically in how English has distinguished here the positive versus the negative use of shit, as opposed to something that one might expected to see mirrored in any way by other languages.

Even in English, it is a very unusual distinction and you don’t even see it in other English words that are used to mean both “terrible” and “amazing” such as sick or mad.