majuscules in English (was Re: simple ui question)

Subject: majuscules in English (was Re: simple ui question)
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2005 06:16:21 -0500


Al,

Your observation directly contradicts my own. You've noticed that diotima has rather aggressively adopted a feature of IM style (or is that im style) in her (or his???) posts to this list; but evidence from other posts suggests this is strictly an affectation on the part of someone who knows quite well what the rules are.

And it's true that over the last few hundred years the trend among editors has been in the general direction from upstyle to downstyle.

But what I've noticed as a much more annoying trend is the unselfconscious Capitalization of every Noun--Or Even Every Word--by non-writers. It's as if there is something about the German rule that is intuitively appealing to people who never paid attention in English class. Surely, as someone who also works in marketing, er, Marketing, you've seen this, too.

Majuscules haven't always been mixed with minuscules, of course, and our choices of when to use one or the other is something that is as subject to fashion as, say, the Oxford comma or the hyphen. After all, the two alphabets were initially developed for different purposes (inscription on stone capitals in one case and quill-on-paper in the other); and it was a number of centuries before they were integrated in the first place, let alone subjected to any sort of consistent rules.

Dick

Al Geist wrote:


Is it just me, or did someone pass a law over the holidays that banished capital letters from the English language? I won't talk about punctuation 'cause I also work in marketing.

Al

diotima wrote:

thanks for the responses. i liked dick's idea, which was exactly what i had in mind except for the placement of a word, which made all the difference in the world. and dharuni's idea was brilliant too.



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Follow-Ups:

References:
RE: simple ui question: From: diotima
Re: simple ui question: From: Al Geist

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