Capital Letters

By John Weeren

The conventions of our language are not immutable. Grammar and usage are ever-changing, and what was true of the 18th century is no longer true of ours. Capitalization is a case in point. When, in 1726, Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels, it was customary to capitalize common nouns, yielding a sentence like this: “Having therefore consulted with my Wife, and some of my Acquaintance, I determined to go again to Sea.” By the 19th century, capital letters were being used more sparingly, as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, published in 1818, attests: “Her tranquility was not improved by the General’s impatience for the appearance of his eldest son, nor by the displeasure he expressed at his laziness when Captain Tilney at last came down.”

Fast forward to the bicentennial of this novel’s publication, and we find another change: the G in General has been lowercased, even though it references a specific individual. This reflects what is now considered good practice, i.e., to only capitalize a title when it precedes a name, as in the case of Captain Tilney. In other words, to quote The Chicago Manual of Style, “In text, titles following a personal name or used alone in place of a name (other than in direct address) are, with few exceptions, lower-cased.” One of these exceptions involves the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, given the confusion that could arise if the holder of this office were referenced as the speaker, when the House holds 435 of them.

So, what are we left with? Capital letters continue to denote the beginning of a sentence and, unique to English, the pronoun I. Proper nouns, which The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation defines as the “formal or official name of a specific person, place, or thing”—Harry, Argentina, Microsoft Corporation, Times Square, War and Peace—are also capitalized, along with many words related to them, such as the proper adjectives American, Protestant, Aristotelian, Gothic, and Greco-Roman.

But, as in the case of titles, capitalization is not without its quirks. The Chicago Manual of Style, for example, blesses both french fries and French dressing, while the Oxford English Dictionary accepts space age and Space Age but only Stone Age. Merriam-Webster lowercases draconian while acknowledging that it is “often capitalized,” as indeed it was in the 1919 edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Days and months are capitalized, but seasons are not, unless they form part of a proper noun, as in Winter Olympics. And, nota bene, the Associated Press, whose stylebook guides our Office of Communications, “would not,” in its words, “capitalize fall semester (just as we would not capitalize academic year).”

Speaking of the Office of Communications, our colleagues there maintain a Princeton-focused editorial style guide that addresses many capitalization-related questions, including exceptions to generally accepted rules. These include capitalizing the titles of endowed professorship holders, regardless of placement, and capitalizing University whenever it refers to Princeton, even when it stands alone. Princeton’s style guide frowns on capitalizing disciplines, other than a language, as in history; years of study, as in junior; and, outside formal contexts, degrees, as in bachelor’s. But it is a measure of their greatness that Princeton’s classes always begin with a capital letter, as in the Class of 2015.

Capital letters won’t be disappearing from English any time soon, but their use will undoubtedly continue to evolve, reflecting our admirable if sometimes quixotic (lowercase) quest for linguistic clarity.