5 ms·
It’s not a proper noun, and this is HN: pedantry is par. “The president of Xyz” capitalizes the X in Xyz(pn) but not the P in president(n). However, the P in Pr
by altairprime 6mo ago
It’s not a proper noun, and this is HN: pedantry is par. “The president of Xyz” capitalizes the X in Xyz(pn) but not the P in president(n). However, the P in President(pn) is capitalized when it’s a Title suffixed to a Name - but that varies per country by what they title their president-equivalent locally and isn’t always translated, while the concept-slash-role label of ‘president’ in English generally does not (and is often used interchangeably, albeit somewhat wrongly, for ‘monarch’ and other such single-person executive-leader roles). (That we use the same spelling for both title and concept is annoying, as usual :)
- reactordev 6mo agoPresident is a title here so Capitalization is correct use. That last one wasn’t. To be pedantic, we all know which one I was referring to.
- nickburns 6mo agoThe word 'president' being a potential title doesn't make it a title nor a proper noun in all contexts. Your bio contains comma splice, by the way.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoThey’re trolling.
- nickburns 6mo agoI'm not.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoIf you’re not, and I say this in good faith, take your own advice around your tone. Making assumptions about other people, and then doubling down when they correct you, comes across as a kind of horrible I doubt you truly are.
- nickburns 6mo agoI say this in good faith: oh, stop.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoRight, you’re a troll. Something, something Dwight Macdonald about parody needing to be smart and not bitter.
- nickburns 6mo agoNothing here is remotely parody.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoI guess one doesn’t need to know they’re a parody to be funny.
- nickburns 6mo agoAs if that makes any sense.
- reactordev 6mo agodoes it piss you off that punct isn't used properly anymore and that, commas, can happen anywhere? Are you one of those who still has use for em-dash?
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Are you one of those who still has use for em-dash? I still like ‘em!
- nickburns 6mo agoThis meme, too—shall pass.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> It’s not a proper noun The President, within this context, identifies a single entity. As such, it is a proper noun. Analogy: there are many continents. But if we're discussing Brexit, the Continent is a proper noun. I don't think it's incorrect to not capitalise. But it's certainly gramatically okay, and not in the same bucket as The Nutters who capitalise Random words it Looks like Legalese.
- nickburns 6mo ago> The President, within this context, identifies a single entity. As such, it is a proper noun Yeah, no. You're just making things up to suit your position like the president does.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> no. You're just making things ...this isn't a counterargument. I can similarly assert you're justing making stuff up, which isn't untrue, either way, since we're talking about language, a wholly made-up enterprise. What's your contention that the President, within the context of the American presidency, does not refer to a single entity? Is this a preference? Or something you actually believe is incorrect?
- nickburns 6mo agoYou got the impression I was trying to argue with you? Go look it up like the president doesn't. I'm personally not a recognized grammar authority.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- marcus_holmes 6mo agoI was just talking about this today: I have an internal convention to not capitalise LLMs when talking about them as if they were people; so claude is not capitalised, and the internal LLM-based service agent we're building, rex, is not capitalised. I realise this breaks the capitalisation of proper nouns; claude is a name and therefore a proper noun and therefore should be capitalised. But I like that there's a signal in here that the thing I'm talking about is not a person and so we don't capitalise the name (I realise that cities or companies or other things that we capitalise are also not people). Digression, but then so was the entire discussion on capitalisation.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> the thing I'm talking about is not a person Countries, companies, religions; hell, planets and galaxies–none of these are sapient. Yet we capitalise them. I'll go out into the deep end for a second with a hypothesis: I think we capitalise because it makes printed text easier to scan. The words you need to spend more time on are capitalised because they aren't ones you can just roll through. This is also why the nutter affect of capitalising random words is so distracting–it drives attention to non-standard words that are, with minimum thought, being used perfectly standardly.
- nickburns 6mo agoYou clearly speak only one language.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoWrong again!
- nickburns 6mo agoI doubt it.
- iamnothere 6mo agoWhat is your opinion on Japanese who use カタカナ for emphasis or style