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 [...]