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Who added the question mark to the title and why? At least make it "How do Elephants Avoid Cancer?" so it's a grammatically correct sentence.
by ginko 5y ago
Who added the question mark to the title and why? At least make it "How do Elephants Avoid Cancer?" so it's a grammatically correct sentence.
- OJFord 5y agoI'm more irked, as usual, by HN's Automatic Click-Bait Case-ifying. You can, and I do when submitting, remove it by editing the title, but of course most people don't and why should they. Seems to go against the guideline to, generally speaking, leave the title as it is in the original article, too.
- codetrotter 5y ago> Automatic Click-Bait Case-ifying You mean title case? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case > Title case or headline case is a style of capitalization used for rendering the titles of published works or works of art in English. It’s got nothing to do with click-bait. It’s part of English grammar.
- messe 5y agoIt's nothing to do with grammar, it's a purely stylistic choice.
- djhn 5y agoOh but what is grammar if not a bunch of stylistic choices that over time have settled? I hate title case, but unfortunately it seems to have become The Way We Write Titles.
- playpause 5y agoThat might just be an American perspective. It is not standard elsewhere. I just checked all the UK and Canadian newspaper sites I can think of, and not one of them uses Stupid Title Case.
- OJFord 5y agoAh I think you're on to something there - I almost said (and this would explain why) that Bloomberg is the only publication I read that I notice/can think of that does this. It just has click-bait/spam associations to me since that's where I generally see it: I don't like the look of the title, so I look at the URL, if it's 'amazingwownewsdaily.com' or something I move on; if it's 'bloomberg.com' or something recognisable (-ly good) I think 'oh ok, ugh, but ok' and open it.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoThere are two things here. Title capitalization is definitely a part of English orthography. Any book you take, no matter what English-speaking country the author is from, will always use title case, unless it wants to make a point (avant-garde etc.). However, there are differences as to what deserves to be capitalized. Just the titles of books, films, etc? What about the titles of articles, are they in any way different, or maybe worse than the titles of books etc.? I guess this need for consistency pervades the American usage, codified in the CMoS and other style guides, and hence applied universally.
- thatcat 5y agoIt's based on the AP style guide used in US print journalism.
- OJFord 5y agoExactly, a stylistic choice frequently made by click-bait type sites like Buzzfeed, and not made by Nature in the submission.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoCapitalization is part of orthography, not grammar.
- stronglikedan 5y agoPedantically, yes. Ubiquitously, no.
- OJFord 5y agoOn the contrary it has nothing to do with grammar, and I relate it to click-bait because it's so frequently done by such articles by BuzzFeed and the like; with much more prevalence than among things I actually want to read. It is typically a signal that I don't want to read something, which makes it especially confusing on HN, which is generally a list of things I do want to read.