[Ads-l] inappropriate capital letter

[Stanton McCandlish]

A constant struggle at Wikipedia is preventing and undoing the
capitalization-for-signification bad habit ("I want a capital here to show
that I think this is important"). That *Politico* bit, via James Landau,
highlighted one of the common reasons (among several others, including the
habit's inherent viewpoint advocacy) that misuse of capitals in this
marketer-style way is a terrible idea, at least outside of ad campaigns and
warning signage: It often produces a whole or short-form proper name with a
meaning, for some subset of readers, that diverges sharply from the
intended general sense (there, "Democratic [Party]" versus "democratic").

I'm not certain where the impulse really comes from. Some years ago, I
worked at an organization in which the executive director insisted on
writing things like: "Today, Security and Privacy are challenging but
important needs for Human Rights Workers and Journalists in conflict areas,
in which Governments and other parties may go to extreme lengths to
intercept Electronic Communications ...." When I stripped out all the
extraneous capitalization and turned it into normal English, he'd get quite
angry and try to tell me I was "weakening" it and making it "harder to
understand", as if capital letters were simultaneously a form of
punctuation and an alternative to italicization for semantic emphasis (not
that the latter would actually be appropriate on any of those words in the
sample, except possibly the opening "security" and "privacy", depending on
the rest of the piece's content). It didn't matter how many style guides I
showed him against doing this, he really, really wanted to do it – would
even re-rewrite to enforce it, after publication – and was convinced it was
"right" (or "Right" as he would have had it). I left after a while, because
an obsessively micromanaging exec. dir. who will not let their comms. dir. do
their actual job equates to a badly dysfunctional organization.

While this sort of thing is common in marketing copy, in some forms of
officialese, especially military, and sometimes (decreasingly) in legalese,
it has not been normal English style since around the turn of the 18th
century to the 19th. So, it's strange to me that various – generally
amateur and untrained – writers seem addicted to decorating miscellaneous
words and phrases with capitals to try to browbeat the reader with implied
significance. Where are they picking up the habit, and why so strongly? My
insistent former boss is hardly alone; the majority of Wikipedia's longest
and most heated internal disputes over style have been specifically about
such over-capitalization, and this doesn't seem likely to abate in the near
future.

A few oddball stylistic trends in very modern writing can be traced to
specific sources. E.g., the fad over the last 20-something years to
italicize quotations for no clear reason is because it was the default CSS
for the blockquote HTML element in some early blogging and other
content-management systems. That's also the cause of the sore confusion
between block and pull quotations, and putting the former in the
giant-quotation-marks style often used for the latter (as was done by some
competing early blog/CMS packages). It also accounts for the sudden rise in
American "Month DD, YYYY" date format in British and other non-US
publications, plus spread of odd "Month DD YYYY" and "DD Month, YYYY"
formats that mix elements of the traditional US style and the "DD Month
YYYY" format that dominates in most other countries. People (including
major publishers) often enough simply never bothered to change the
software's defaults.

But that sort of thing can't explain the "Signification Capitals" habit. I
can't blame it on social media and texting, either, since the general trend
therein is to just drop capitalization and punctuation entirely (except for
"!" repurposed as an enthusiasm signal, which may die out eventually
because of the rise of more specific emoji). It seems dubious to me that ad
copy and bureaucratese by themselves can account for SigCaps.



On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 7:24 PM James Landau <
00000c13e57d49b8-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

> https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/10/trump-campaign-hack-00173503
> From an article on Politco about Trump campaign documents being hacked:
> <begin quote>
> “These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to
> the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow
> chaos throughout our Democratic process, " [Trump campaign spokesperson
> Steven] Cheung said.
> <end quote>
> I imagine the capital "D" was the fault of Politico, not the Trump
> campaign or Mr. Cheung.
> - Jim Landau“These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources
> hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election
> and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process,” Cheung said. “
> James Landau
> jjjrlandau at netscape.com
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org