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Capital crimes
I’m writing about a lot of celestial stuff at the moment—mostly circumpolar stars, but occasionally a planet, and maybe some Sun and Moon too. One issue that’s come up, which is technically minor, but is obviously major enough for me to have a little rant here about it, is the capitalization (or not) of celestial bodies. Specifically, the Sun, Moon and Earth.
Now, Mercury, Venus, Pluto, Polaris, Vega, Mirphak, Zubenelgenubi, they all get capitalized, no questions asked. But Sun, Moon and Earth? I challenge you to find any real consensus on this.
The most common answer seems to be that you capitalize them when you’re talking astronomy to someone, e.g. “The Earth orbits the Sun, and the Moon orbits the Earth.” But if you’re just talking about them in an everyday context, you don’t, e.g. “The sun’s warm today.”
Now, that last instance looks right to me. It’s how most people write. But I don’t see any sense in it. Or any other instance of these bodies being uncapitalized. They’re all proper nouns: “a noun representing a unique entity (such as London, Jupiter, John Hunter, or Toyota)”. There are some variations in the definition of proper nouns—the names of days and months are proper nouns in English, but not in many other languages. Fair enough, they’re abstract entities. But the Sun, Moon and Earth are as proper as nouns get. They’re unique, and very concrete.
There is the fact that these words can also refer to a class of entity, e.g. every star is a sun, in its own context; Jupiter has moons. But surely if you’re talking about the Sun or the Moon, capitalizing them is a way of being clear. I guess that until we start travelling to other planets (or stars), saying, “The sun is warm today” doesn’t need much clarification. But still, the principle holds.
As to why anyone would lowercase “Earth”—I’m lost on that one. Sure, you pick up a handful of dirt, you say, “Look at this lovely earth!” That’s a different meaning of the same word, which isn’t a proper noun, so you don’t capitalize it. Simple. But when you’re saying “the Earth rotates on its axis” or “he’s the most pedantic person on Earth”—why would anyone lowercase it? Because a style guide says so? What reason does it give?
I guess there’s an argument that it’s just the natural drift of language that’s commonly used, like “e-mail” becoming “email”. But I talk about London more than the Earth, and no one has ever started writing “london” (outside SMS and people who don’t write properly anyway).
The thing is, I’ve started coming across excellent books on the history of astronomy, recent books published by reputable academic presses, and they’re lowercasing “Earth” always, even in an astronomical context.
I would say (with tongue in cheek), “It’s XYZ gone mad.” But for the life of me, I can’t think what that “XYZ” even is.
Comments
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Plus, a poser for any celestially-minded grammaticians. Should we capitalize “pole star” or not? It seems to be a proper noun—there’s only one pole star, after all. At least, only one per hemisphere. Well, there’s one in the northern hemisphere. For now. In 10,000 years, Polaris won’t be the pole star. There won’t be one. Another 10,000 years, and Thuban will be the pole star. A few more thousand, and Polaris is back. Is “pole star” a proper noun? :-/
Gyrus - 30th November 2011 @ 20:59
Earth should be capitalized, clearly. But one of my bugbears is saying ‘the Earth’, instead of just Earth. We don’t say the Mars or the Venus, so why the Earth? It’s Earth. We live on Earth.
Joel - 3rd December 2011 @ 4:15
As for sun and moon, look at it this way: if we had two moons you wouldn’t say two Moons would you? Is the fact that we only have one reason enough them to capitalize it? I think not. Similarly if we has two suns. Merely having one orange instead of two isn’t a reason to say ‘I’ve just eaten the Orange’.
Joel - 3rd December 2011 @ 4:28
It’s annoying to make sloppy spelling errors when making a fine point about language. Substitute ‘had’ for ‘has’ and ‘then’ for ‘them’. And ‘say’ should be ‘write’.
Joel - 3rd December 2011 @ 4:37
Thanks Joel, I was relying on you for some good input. I should have just emailed you instead of posting :)
Very fair point about “the Earth”. As for Sun and Moon, I disagree. These are the names we gave these objects, which were singular in every sense until, well, Giordano Bruno and Galileo I guess. Then we began to adapt them as common nouns for use in non-geocentric contexts. If we had always had two moons, we would have given them individual proper nouns (which we would capitalize) as well as possibly having a common noun for both of them, which would be ready to apply to other moons as we woke up to the fact that such things exist.
Regarding the spelling, you’re on the internet. If you’re going to say “we has two suns”, just use “haz” and you’re good ;)
Gyrus - 3rd December 2011 @ 11:30
Actually, “the” seems to be an interesting weirdness here. Even though I can’t think of a reason to lowercase “Sun”, I would always use “the Sun”. Same for the Moon. So why Earth, or Mars? Is “the” how we’ve come to be definite about our star and our satellite as “Sun” and “Moon” have become common nouns in the modern era? So it’s “a sun” or “the sun”—and the definite article kind of stands in for the capitalization to make a proper noun in the latter?
Gyrus - 3rd December 2011 @ 11:41
Well it’s precisely because sun and moon are generic terms that we use the definite article to refer to ‘our’ sun and ‘our’ moon. Whereas Earth is the name of our planet. It is very old-fashioned to capitalize sun and moon, whereas Earth cannot be put in lowercase unless you’re going to do the same for Mars and Mercury, the exception being in familiar phrases such as ‘What on earth are you doing?’. You can disagree on sun and moon, but it means you’re stuck in the 1950s when capitalization was fairly haphazard and few people had thought the issue through with any kind of sleekness. You will come to agree with me. I am quite certain about these kinds of style issues. Why not see what a few style manuals such as ‘The Chicago Manual of Style’ have to say? This is fundamentally a style issue. When you say you think sun and moon should be capitalized all you’re saying is that this is the style you have decided on, and you have attempted a rationalization. Nonetheless, mine is the better style, being clean and modern.
Joel - 4th December 2011 @ 5:46
And yes, I agree that the use of the definite article with sun and moon is a little like a vestigial capital. All the more reason not to cap them up still further. But as I said it’s not a matter of correct or incorrect English so much as a matter of which style one chooses: old-fashioned or modern. But those who lowercase Earth yet capitalize the names of other planets cannot be said to have a very praiseworthy style since they self-evidently haven’t thought it through. The very idea of style is a consistency with its own internal logic. Once you start capping up sun and moon you’ll find other things to cap up, and you’ll lose the tight grip that style should be. As you yourself have found, by wondering whether to cap up pole star. Next it’ll be the names of the seasons and the directions. And every word in the title of a book or article.
Joel - 4th December 2011 @ 6:15
The book I found with Earth lowercased had it lowercased throughout, in every instance—that’s the real “crime” I wanted to nail. Totally odd.
Using the definite article instead of capitalization for sun and moon does seem like something I’ll fall in line with, mein style Führer! But not without noting a few things.
It will still seem a bit weird writing, “Venus, Mars, and the other planets revolve around the sun.” As I mentioned in the post, you’ll find that style guides rarely agree on this issue, but some talk of capitalizing sun and moon in astronomical contexts. Seems like kowtowing to an arbitrary style shift.
And it was surely arbitrary. If capitalizing sun and moon is old-fashioned, presumably lowercasing them became modern when the amount of people being slipshod outnumbered those trying to keep a tight grip? Or did I miss a meeting?
But we capitalize the months and days. Again, I’ll kowtow for style’s sake, but that’ll be my “tight grip”, not the language’s.
An ironic punchline I assume, given your mention of ‘The Chicago Manual of Style’? Personally, I capitalize these.
I wonder why language style is so linear and progressive? We’re fine with people carrying off retro clothes and interior decorating.
Gyrus - 4th December 2011 @ 13:41
In a bibliography, I tend to follow how it was originally published (unless there is another rule in-house), which is a little annoying because then you appear to have a mix of styles to those who don’t know your ‘logic’. I doubt you or I would write ‘The Chicago Manual Of Style’, capping up the ‘of’. Why is that? Why should ‘of’ not be deemed worthy?
It is purely what we have grown used to seeing. I take your point about sun looking a little odd in ‘Venus, Mars, and the other planets revolve around the sun’, but when you say it should be capped up in astronomical contexts there is an argument that there can be no context in which the sun is not astronomical, so then you have to decide whether the context is sufficiently so. A similar thing is ‘the Moon landing’. Because that was a momentous event (not that I think it happened) it seems to require a capital, ‘the moon landing’ doesn’t look important enough.
It is not about being a style fascist (a pedant), it is about having a rigorous approach so future style issues don’t become too pressing. As I say, when you start arbitrarily capping up then you will necessarily have more and more of such decisions until you are fully back in the 1950s and putting a dot after Mr. and writing ‘inter alia’ every few sentences.
Yes, days of the week and months (moon-ths) are capped, but this is fairly arbitrary and a familiarity when seasons aren’t. But there was a time when seasons were capped too. These days style is to lowercase as much as you can get away with. Sun and moon you can certainly get away with. I struggled with this myself as an editor for a good long time, and have come down firmly on the side of this modern style. You’re still flapping about in the wind, I’ll wager.
Joel - 4th December 2011 @ 14:36
When writing books there is a lot to be said for picking one guide and using it as the authority. The Chicago manual displays a lot of intelligence in this regard on all sorts of matters. I also use Chambers dictionary for my decisions on whether a word takes a hyphen or not. And I use Bringhurst on matters of typography. I used to use Hart’s rules too, but that got lost some time ago. Why faff around trying to decide?
I notice I have slipped into writing ‘capitalized’ here instead of my preferred ‘capitalised’. This is a web thing, auto comment spellchecks favour ‘z’ variants (as well as American spelling, even on your blog, but I’m buggered if I’m going to write ‘favor’) and those red wavy lines are very insistent. I’m going to have to use electro-shock therapy to enforce my old consistency.
Joel - 4th December 2011 @ 15:11
Actually, the ‘z’ isn’t a variant as far as Americans are concerned I guess, and you have your spellchecker set to American. Can you not change it to English?
Joel - 4th December 2011 @ 15:21
I think we’re agreeing that the “rules” are partly arbitrary anyway, so it’s tough to internalize “rules”.
Seems to be. I wonder who’ll get “london” and “joel biroco” going?
Thinking it through – though that phrase is deceptive, as it’s hard to properly think things through without actually doing stuff.
As for the “z”, it’s my style that I’m pretty accustomed to. I’ll not bother with the electro-shock unless you can convince me that “ise” is a rule, not style. Why faff around? The good ol’ Wiki says: “the ratio between -ise and -ize stands at 3:2 in the British National Corpus”. Gaining on ya! ;-)
Gyrus - 4th December 2011 @ 15:51
I think I mentioned before that apart from the single exception of ‘capsize’ the ending -ise is never wrong in British English, whereas -ize sometimes is. What better way of not being wrong without thinking?
Joel - 4th December 2011 @ 22:30
I might add that those words in British English that have to be -ise and can’t be -ize are also -ise in American English, such as ‘advertise’ and ‘compromise’. You’ll have to remember which ones they are, like Americans, whereas if you routinely, as a British person, used the -ise ending you wouldn’t have to remember anything.
Joel - 4th December 2011 @ 22:35
Just read your old article about Doc Hyatt’s undoing book. The I read the current article, under which I’m posting this comment. Funny argument, but what’s the point? Not that there needs to be one, but I’m curious if you intended one. ;)
In any case, lots more undoing happenings, and we’ve stripped away most of the belief tunnels you mention…
Have fun!
Garrett - 13th December 2011 @ 5:24
Hi Garrett, the “argument” here is admittedly trivial in the scheme of things, but the issues are pretty clearly laid out. What was it you didn’t get?
Gyrus - 13th December 2011 @ 10:17