Hello, OldHand LukeJavan8! From another venue long ago, I recall that you were very good at welcoming "Strangers" and "Newbies" (rather than rough treating them like "igrunt newcomers" as your less gracious colleagues were wont to do!)
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ON CAPITALIZING, there is some order midst disorder, and hints are to be found in the questions and comments posed by the writers whose names appear above.
TRESSUPS: "If the words originate from proper names it makes sense that you would capitalize it, but it does not seem to be consistent. Can anyone shed any light on this? Is there a standard?"
TSUWM: "not really a standard, but it seems that the caps tend to disappear as usage widens."
THE RENOWNED JAMES KILPATRICK: "The Court of Peeves, Irks & Crotchets resumes . . . with a petition from William H. Painter of Las Vegas. He asks a declaratory ruling on the capitalization of eponyms. With deference to Painter, a favorite correspondent, the court declines. ... The court can discover no bright-line rule. ... Perhaps [another] author has propounded a stylistic rule on capitalization. The court would be grateful for any advice it can get."
DEBRA LEE: "I believe the rule is that if you change a proper noun it ceases to be a proper noun and therefore it is not capitalized."

In a law-school course on patents and trademarks, I recall how the odyssean
marketing efforts of LEVI STRAUSS (makers of jeans) and the CATERPILLAR TRACTOR CO. (mfrs. of earth-moving equipment) to persuade whole populations
to think "Levis" for jeans and "Caterpillar" for earth-movers . . . ultimately led in
both cases, through wide increases in usage, to de-capitalization: levis and caterpillar each became generic. And the signal proprietary advantages that each company had so enjoyed through great marketing efforts over many years was now suddenly dissipated and lost through that de-capitalization. You could now go into J.C.Penney and ask for "levis" and be sold a house brand, because "levis" now referred to really ANY kind of jeans. Thus TSUWM was on point to say
"it seems that the caps tend to disappear as usage widens." And I submit that this classic case of "Levis" and "Caterpillar" shows how many eponyms lost their
capital letters in just such manner, a bit like the way Special Women can lose their virginity and be decapitalized through too broad a usage (this BS is just a test to see if anyone has bothered to read down this far . . .)
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The Kilpatrick quotation (imperfectly) illustrates how Legalese (capitalized here
because it is arguably a separate language) despite its wretched inelegance does
nonetheless contain great consistency in the word-capitalization game. I believe it almost reduces to this: if you use "the" in front of the noun, it should be
capitalized; but if you use "a" before such noun, the word loses the special
uniqueness and particularity that "THE" loaned to it. Thus in any brief or
motion, court will be capitalized if it is a PARTICULAR court. So similarly will
Plaintiff and Defendant be capitalized IF there is only one particular plaintiff
or defendant. Kilpatrick ironically reflects this principle in the first line of the
above quote: ""The Court of Peeves . . . resumes" and Court is in caps. But as the long paragraph continues he FORGETS this rule and 'court' thereafter is all lower-case. But Kilpatrick is not a lawyer: we don't need to hold him to the silly
legalese rule (and I think most worry about "capitalization" is pretty silly anyhow:
WHY THE HELL DOES CAPITALIZATION REALLY MATTER? It doesn't make the
words sexier, or you richer for using CAPITALS because you really can't get much
capital out of Capitalizing. What you CAN get out of capitalizing is Confused.


Chuckledore (technically a "stranger", but while I'm strange, I don't
really feel like a stranger here. . .)