In any case, lots more undoing happenings, and we’ve stripped away most of the belief tunnels you mention…

Have fun!

when you start arbitrarily capping up

I think we’re agreeing that the “rules” are partly arbitrary anyway, so it’s tough to internalize “rules”.

These days style is to lowercase as much as you can get away with

Seems to be. I wonder who’ll get “london” and “joel biroco” going?

You’re still flapping about in the wind, I’ll wager.

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! ;-)

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.

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.

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?

Next it’ll be the names of the seasons and the directions.

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.

And every word in the title of a book or article.

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.