5 ms·

Why do the style guides of these large organisations often insist on the ludicrous capitalisation of "EBay" when it appears at the start of a sentence?

thomasfedb 8y ago
As a writer I will jump through linguistic hoops to move uncapitalised proper names away from the start of a sentence - for example, a medical device called "i-gel" which I wrote a paper on. Starting a sentence without a capital is just too jarring in formal writing I find.
- tonyarkles 8y ago
  Yeah, doing a MSc in CS that references a bunch of companies and open source projects... there was definitely some mangling needed to keep the uncapitalized proper nouns away from the start of sentences.
- adrianratnapala 8y ago
  Yep. For hundreds of years English has had a rule that proper nouns are capitalised; it is pretentious to imagine that "myThingy is soooo cool that you can't even use the rules of English on it." Now in some fields, like computer documentation, there's practical reason to change. It would be confusing to capitalise command-names if they are lower-case in their (case sensitive) native language. But newspapers aren't bound by that consideration, and it doesn't really apply to company names anyway.
  - FearNotDaniel 8y ago
    Actually, look in any book printed 18th/early 19th century and you'll see that the rules were quite different then: all nouns were capitalised, as in modern German, and the 'long s' was frequently used in the middle of words. Mass literacy, almost-universal schooling along with physical punishments for children not doing exactly what the textbook said have given us moderns the idea that the 'proper' English of our grandparents remained the same for centuries, but really the language has always been in flux and the rate of change just got significantly slowed by cultural pressures between approximately 1850s to 1950s.
    - thomasfedb 8y ago
      I don't think of myself as a total sheep - case in point I put the comma outside of the quotation mark because otherwise it parses weird.
      - hnal943 8y ago
        You are fighting the good fight.
    - adrianratnapala 8y ago
      > all nouns were capitalised But that is still a rule that all proper nouns are capitalised. It's also beside the point. No one is claiming that rules don't change, or even that they are sharply defined. I was claiming that it is presumptuous complain about other people when they follow the traditional rules.
  - thomasfedb 8y ago
    Even then, I don't think anybody would be outraged if I wrote 'Rsync' or 'Grep'.
jedberg 8y ago
It usually happens because they have an unbreakable rule that all sentences start with a capital letter.
- Stratoscope 8y ago
  That is no doubt the reason, and it seems like a reasonable rule on the face of it. But there ought to be another rule that takes priority over that one: when you use the name of a person or company, capitalize and spell it as they spell it. They are the ones who get to decide. It's not the prerogative of a third-party publisher or newswriter to override that. It seems like a simple matter of humbleness and deference to whoever owns the name. It's eBay, not EBay, and IBM, not I.B.M. What I don't understand is why a news organization would feel it's their business to override that - and why it's especially prevalent in the N.Y.C. media. It is entertaining though! :-)
  - YouAreGreat 8y ago
    > They are the ones who get to decide Once upon a time, the late musician Prince decided to change his name. Turns out that no, you don't always "get to decide" and even fans don't follow your every whim: Most ignored his choice and without much "humbleness and deference" started referring to him as TAFKAP—"The Artist Formerly Known As Prince."
    - jen729w 8y ago
      Well, that and he changed his name to a glyph which didn’t actually appear on anyone’s system. It was practically impossible to call him by his ‘real’ name even if you had wanted to.
      - pssflops 8y ago
        Prince had mailed out floppy disks to news organizations to accommodate that change. [0] The Prince font substituted his symbol for what would otherwise be a capital P. In addition, the font was also made available for download on CompuServe. [0] http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/04/princes-legendary-floppy-disk-symbol-font.html http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/04/princes-legendary-floppy-...
Stratoscope 8y ago
I don't know if it is large organizations in general, more specifically it seems to be the N.Y.C. media. They are so stuck in their hidebound style guides and rules that they apply them even when they are wrong. N.Y.C. itself is another of their rules: put the dots in anything that seems like it might be an acronym or initialism, even when when the rest of the world stopped using the dots decades ago. When was the last time you saw NYC spelled as N.Y.C. anywhere, except for the N.Y.C. media? These organizations will always write I.B.M., F.B.I., C.I.A., H.P., and so forth, even when those companies and organizations themselves do not use the dots in their official names. What I can't answer, though, is your question: why do they insist on this even when it contradicts the correct usage?
- antonvs 8y ago
  Why? Historical pretension.

thomasfedb 8y ago

As a writer I will jump through linguistic hoops to move uncapitalised proper names away from the start of a sentence - for example, a medical device called "i-gel" which I wrote a paper on. Starting a sentence without a capital is just too jarring in formal writing I find.

tonyarkles 8y ago
Yeah, doing a MSc in CS that references a bunch of companies and open source projects... there was definitely some mangling needed to keep the uncapitalized proper nouns away from the start of sentences.
adrianratnapala 8y ago
Yep. For hundreds of years English has had a rule that proper nouns are capitalised; it is pretentious to imagine that "myThingy is soooo cool that you can't even use the rules of English on it." Now in some fields, like computer documentation, there's practical reason to change. It would be confusing to capitalise command-names if they are lower-case in their (case sensitive) native language. But newspapers aren't bound by that consideration, and it doesn't really apply to company names anyway.
- FearNotDaniel 8y ago
  Actually, look in any book printed 18th/early 19th century and you'll see that the rules were quite different then: all nouns were capitalised, as in modern German, and the 'long s' was frequently used in the middle of words. Mass literacy, almost-universal schooling along with physical punishments for children not doing exactly what the textbook said have given us moderns the idea that the 'proper' English of our grandparents remained the same for centuries, but really the language has always been in flux and the rate of change just got significantly slowed by cultural pressures between approximately 1850s to 1950s.
  - thomasfedb 8y ago
    I don't think of myself as a total sheep - case in point I put the comma outside of the quotation mark because otherwise it parses weird.
    - hnal943 8y ago
      You are fighting the good fight.
  - adrianratnapala 8y ago
    > all nouns were capitalised But that is still a rule that all proper nouns are capitalised. It's also beside the point. No one is claiming that rules don't change, or even that they are sharply defined. I was claiming that it is presumptuous complain about other people when they follow the traditional rules.
- thomasfedb 8y ago
  Even then, I don't think anybody would be outraged if I wrote 'Rsync' or 'Grep'.

jedberg 8y ago

It usually happens because they have an unbreakable rule that all sentences start with a capital letter.

Stratoscope 8y ago
That is no doubt the reason, and it seems like a reasonable rule on the face of it. But there ought to be another rule that takes priority over that one: when you use the name of a person or company, capitalize and spell it as they spell it. They are the ones who get to decide. It's not the prerogative of a third-party publisher or newswriter to override that. It seems like a simple matter of humbleness and deference to whoever owns the name. It's eBay, not EBay, and IBM, not I.B.M. What I don't understand is why a news organization would feel it's their business to override that - and why it's especially prevalent in the N.Y.C. media. It is entertaining though! :-)
- YouAreGreat 8y ago
  > They are the ones who get to decide Once upon a time, the late musician Prince decided to change his name. Turns out that no, you don't always "get to decide" and even fans don't follow your every whim: Most ignored his choice and without much "humbleness and deference" started referring to him as TAFKAP—"The Artist Formerly Known As Prince."
  - jen729w 8y ago
    Well, that and he changed his name to a glyph which didn’t actually appear on anyone’s system. It was practically impossible to call him by his ‘real’ name even if you had wanted to.
    - pssflops 8y ago
      Prince had mailed out floppy disks to news organizations to accommodate that change. [0] The Prince font substituted his symbol for what would otherwise be a capital P. In addition, the font was also made available for download on CompuServe. [0] http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/04/princes-legendary-floppy-disk-symbol-font.html http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/04/princes-legendary-floppy-...

Stratoscope 8y ago

I don't know if it is large organizations in general, more specifically it seems to be the N.Y.C. media. They are so stuck in their hidebound style guides and rules that they apply them even when they are wrong. N.Y.C. itself is another of their rules: put the dots in anything that seems like it might be an acronym or initialism, even when when the rest of the world stopped using the dots decades ago. When was the last time you saw NYC spelled as N.Y.C. anywhere, except for the N.Y.C. media? These organizations will always write I.B.M., F.B.I., C.I.A., H.P., and so forth, even when those companies and organizations themselves do not use the dots in their official names. What I can't answer, though, is your question: why do they insist on this even when it contradicts the correct usage?

antonvs 8y ago
Why? Historical pretension.