On craigslist and e e cummings

[Victor]

Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy blog is an immigrant law
professor with an outside interest in linguistic issues. I can really
say that Volokh is a pure prescriptivist, but he does have occasional
flourishes of prescriptivism. Irrespectively of the quality of his usual
analysis, the latest post (actually, a post from 6/17, but it is the
latest on the subject) analyzes craigslist motion to dismiss a suit
against them. In this case, I would even qualify the topic as
linguistics, but it may well be of interest because it does deal with
language usage, albeit in writing. (Perhaps it's more of a semiotic
issue ;-)

http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_06_14-2009_06_20.shtml#1245257795

Volokh takes exception to the capitalization used in the document
generated by craigslist lawyers--throughout, the company refers to
itself as "craigslist", irrespectively of where the word occurs,
including at the beginning of a sentence. Here are Volokh's comments:

 >>...that strikes me as quite jarring to the reader. Having a business
name be uncapitalized in the middle of the sentence ("on the craigslist
website") is odd enough, but having the first word of a sentence
uncapitalized ("craigslist has great sympathy," "craigslist condemns")
is even more unusual and therefore likely to be distracting and annoying.

 >>Of course, I'm sure a judge or a law clerk won't deliberately rule
against Craigslist for unusual capitalization. But my sense is that this
sort of departure from otherwise rigid linguistic norms is likely to put
some readers in a slightly worse mood, and make them slightly less
receptive to the substantive argument (if only because they're
distracted from it by the capitalization choice).

 >>Nor can one say that somehow this capitalization choice is required
in English to accurately reproduce the company's name (which is why, for
instance, we'd use 3M to refer to 3M even though names that start with
numbers are highly unusual in English). Even if that might justify
leaving "craigslist" uncapitalized in the middle of a sentence (which I
doubt), it provides no explanation for having "craigslist" be
uncapitalized as the first word of a sentence. After all, normal English
words that are generally uncapitalized are capitalized at the start of a
sentence; why should "craigslist" be any different?

Volokh then makes a point that, when in court, one "should do as the
judges do", suggesting that judges and clerks might be unhappy about the
capitalization, which, in turn, would color their judgment in the
proceedings. This may be troubling from the legal perspective, but I am
buying the prescriptivist aspect.

In an update, Volokh persists in his analysis:

 >>Some commenters suggested that having a lower-case "craigslist"
follows the standard usage for proper names, which supposedly never
change their capitalization, even when they start a sentence. But I'm
skeptical that this is a standard exception to the "always capitalize
the first word of a sentence" rule. There are, of course, relatively few
names as to which such a standard exception could even develop, since
most proper names begin with a capital letter. Yet, unless I'm mistaken,
the great majority of such names are names in which there's a lower-case
particle that begins what is generally seen in English as the last name:
Hernando de Soto, Jacobus tenBroek, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the
like. And I'm pretty sure that one would capitalize those last names
(when used in English as last names) when the name started a sentence.

Indeed, de, da, von, van, ter and ten are elements of surnames that are
often (although not always) uncapitalized in most correspondence. That
is, some families/people insist on lack of capitalization while others
expect the opposite. They don't usually switch freely from one to the
other. Not so for similar Semitic names (those with ben, bar, al, etc.).
To be honest, I've thought about the issue (e.g., does one capitalize
"t" in "ten Wolde" at the beginning of a sentence), but never really
tried to resolve it definitively. I am not even sure how it's done in
the native regions (where Roman script is used, that is).

 From where I am sitting, I actually see less of a problem with
"craiglist" remaining uncapitalized than with the names. Aside from "the
user knows best" approach, there is the little matter of trademark--if
craigslist insists that their trademark is specific as to
capitalization, that's the way it should be. But, again, that's a legal
issue.

So, any prescriptive grammarians out there willing to go to bat for Volokh?

    VS-)

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