Good morning one and all. It's Wednesday and mechanics day.
I want to talk about proper nouns today.
We capitalize proper nouns, such as London, Bill and Jaguar because they are nouns referring to a specific place, person or thing.
Common nouns, such as house, cat and park are not capitalized.
A new trend is emerging, however, where some individuals choose not to capitalize their proper names. I sent off some poetry to a Canadian anthology and one of the editors did not capitalize his names.
I respected that, but wondered why.
I haven't done any research into why people may be doing this, but I doubt it's because they want to be viewed as common nouns.
I suppose there may be a certain snobbery behind it--to try and look different, perhaps. Or maybe the argument would be that it is snobby to capitalize people's names in the first place. It's really hard to know.
I think that proper names are capitalized to make the distinction that they are simply not common. If you had a sentence like this for example, 'The jaguar was in the shade under the trees,' and we did not capitalize the 'j' then how would we know if this sentence was about a feline or a certain type of car?
The capitalization of proper nouns does provide a certain clarity as far as the writer being able to clearly express the intended idea.
I will see if I can find any articles on the new lower-casing proper names trend (and if any of you have some ideas please let me know).
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2 comments:
As far as I am aware, the poet EE Cummings (or ee cummings) sometimes did not capitalise his name. He also did not capitalise the word 'I' within his poems. I wonder what this says about the self, or at least how he saw himself?
I was wondering that myself.
How do people view themselves when they choose to not capitalize their names?
I will do some research on this because I am getting more and more curious. Of course, different people may have different reasons, but I'd like to know at least the top three.
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