When you have a sentence that says "...X-number of miles east of said place, do you capitalize the word east (or West, North or South)?
I wouldn't. When you're talking about a geographical location like the name of a city or town, or a region of the world or a country, yeah, but not just raw like that.
According to the stylebook of the US Government Printing Office:
3.21. A descriptive term used to denote a definite region, locality, or geographic feature is a proper name and is therefore capitalized; also for temporary distinction a coined name of a region is capitalized.
3.22. A descriptive term used to denote mere direction or position is not a proper name and is therefore not capitalized.
and there you are.
Wow! Ya mean a stylebook agrees with me? Mark this on y'all's calendar folks.
Well, then, they *are talking about descriptive terms.
Faldage ~
Do you mean that the federal government DOESN'T consult you before it prescribes style?
Are you saying I'm the onliest one they don't consult?
One wonders what Flounder must think of this dialogue which has run away with Flounder's thread.
Ah, but the Great Faldo has style to spare. If'n they's not consultin' him, then they's missin' out ...
... which has run away with Flounder's thread.
Like a fish on a bicycle.
Waal, up in the Zild we have an expression "to flounder around". It means "to blindly move off in any number of convenient but unpremeditated directions at once when you have absolutely no idea of what the hell you're doing".
We don't capitalise "flounder", but.
Don' feel like no lone ranger, Pfranz. USns up here in the real up uses it like that, too.
Once, about a hundred years ago, whilst I was taking an undergraduate journalism class, I wrote an article in which I used an overworked metaphor about "causing the ship of state to founder." The professor, who was well past mental retirement age, changed the verb to "flounder" in red ink on my copy. I asked him what was wrong with the word I chose and he responded that it was simply the wrong one. Alas.
I was taught that the cardinal points, and the seasons, were proper nouns and were, properly, capitalised. So for me it's always North, South, East, West, Summer, Winter, Spring and Autumn. I'm sticking to that. (I'd want to believe a US government official document anyway?)
I suppose if there were only one Summer, but, as I remember, there was one last year and the year before that and the year before that back to the middle of the last century and I have every expectation that there will be one next year and the year after that. As for the cardinal directions, ain't the same thing as relative location of two sites. While you might speak of the narrow road to the deep North, what's north of me is liable to be west of you.
That's the thing, though. In school, these were rules - there was no context-specific information. The word was West, and it didn't matter how it was being used. Maybe I need to reconsider it....
...Nah. That would mean admitting that my teachers were wrong.
I'm with Faldage.
******
On a different note... I often proffer this usage:
"...what's north of me is liable to be west of you."
How did 'liable' become "likely"?
Dunno how it happened, but the OED has a citation from 1682 in the sense subject to the possibility of (doing or undergoing something undesirable. From there to a sense without the undesirablity isn't much of a leap.
I guess that explains both the 'legal' and 'likely' *connection.
Besides, liable isn't quite as strong as likely. Likely implies more than a 50% probability, liable could be less than 50% probable.