5 ms·
Please don't capitalize "city" when referring to SF. To smaller cities it looks pompous, and to bigger cities, laughable.
by raldi 13y ago
Please don't capitalize "city" when referring to SF. To smaller cities it looks pompous, and to bigger cities, laughable.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoThat goes way back - I understand that Istanbul is a corruption of 'to the city'. SO once upon a time road signs in Turkey just said 'to the city'.
- raldi 13y agoAnd yet the residents of Istanbul (and New York, London, Tokyo, Paris...) don't go around thumping their chests with superfluous capitalization of the word "city".
- lttlrck 13y agoThe City of London is such a place. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London
- akgerber 13y agoReferring to Manhattan as 'the city' is very common: http://gothamist.com/2012/05/21/do_you_refer_to_manhattan_as_the_ci.php http://gothamist.com/2012/05/21/do_you_refer_to_manhattan_as... Whether it's capitalized is just a matter of taste, as seen in the comments.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoUh, said road signs? That was them, calling Constantinople 'the City'.
- binarycrusader 13y agoHaving only lived in the SF Bay Area for a few years now, everyone I know that lives in the SF Bay Area refers to San Francisco simply as "the city". They say things like "I went to the city this weekend", etc. So while I agree with the silly capitalisation, I also think it's a losing battle. It's also not a behaviour unique to the SF Bay Area; when I lived in a fairly rural area (pop. < 10K spread over quite a few miles), the largest city nearby was often referred to as "the city" by everyone that lived outside the largest nearby city (which was Kansas City where I lived).
- raldi 13y agoI have no objection to "I went into the city today." It's "I went into The City" that I will not abide.
- bcantrill 13y agoOh, brother. I -- like everyone else in the Bay Area -- also say "the East Bay", "the Peninsula", "the North Bay", "the South Bay" and "the Central Valley" -- even though all of these things are just nouns with minimal adjectives that aren't unique to the Bay Area. (Hell, even "Bay Area" isn't unique to the Bay Area.) So yes, I (again, like everyone around here) say "the City" -- and I know that New Yorkers and Londoners and many others say the same when they're talking about their burg. But this story wasn't a story about New York or London or whatever -- it was about San Francisco, which to me is the City. And if you can find it within yourself to abide my my use of the City in this context, I'll return the favor when we're talking about where you live by letting you refer to it as you do!
- raldi 13y agoI grew up in New York, spent about a decade in Manhattan itself, and have never once seen anyone capitalize either as "The City". In fact, I've never seen anyone refer to any city that way except a minority of people in and around SF. This is why South Park characterized residents of the city as "in love with the smell of their own farts."
- nostrademons 13y agoI was all set to argue, but apparently the Internet's grammar nazis agree with you: http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/17423-Rule-for-capitalization-of-geographical-areas http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/17423-Rule-for-cap... Geographic regions should be capitalized when they refer unambiguously to only one place. A capitalized "the City" implies that "the City" only refers to San Francisco, which is pretty pompous to many other people around the Globe. If this were a Bay Area-only forum, however, it would be justified, as "the City" is pretty unambiguously SF within the Bay Area.
- 13y ago
- hyperbovine 13y ago"pompous"