On craigslist and e e cummings

[Wilson Gray]

"... _irrespectively of_ NP"?!!!

Victor, you bad boy!

-Wilson

On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Victor<aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Victor <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â On craigslist and e e cummings
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>
> 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:
>
> Â >>...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.
>
> Â >>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).
>
> Â >>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:
>
> Â >>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).
>
> Â 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?
>
> Â  Â VS-)
>
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>



--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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