Regarding capitalization, in older times capitals seemed to be used for emphasis in the body of a sentence. Example:
We are Going to the Store, to Buy some Bread.
My questions are: was this accepted usage, or was it a semi-literate affection? What were the rules (if any) for what you capitalized? And about when did this pass out of vouge?
I have never seen that usage. If you want to capitalize for emphasis it would be something like this: We are going to the STORE to BUY some BREAD. Or something similar, deending what you want to emphasize. The first letters of proper nouns and the first letters of the first words in sentences are capitalized. The first letters of the words in a title or subject heading are capitalized unless the words are conjunctions, prepositions, or articles. Those are the only three cases that I can think of at the moment.
I always thought that Capitalization had been used mainly for Nouns (all Nouns, not just Proper Ones), kind of like German today:
We are going to the Store to buy some Bread.
This Webpage confirms this:
http://www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-most-recent/msg03087.html
As to why the Practice was dropped, my Wild-Assed Guess is that People found it too difficult (or were too lazy) to differentiate the Nouns from all of the other Parts of the Sentence. You can see this Process going on Today on the Internet (mostly on E-mail), where Some don’t even bother using the Shift Key and thus write with no Capitals at all. (Too difficult or too lazy? You tell Me.)
Oh, I forgot the first letters of titles or of names of respect: Mr., Mrs., President, Your Honor, Your Excellency, etc.
In his Autobiography, Ben Franklin capitalizes the virtues he identifies.
In the present day you can still see capitalization run riot. Try the ESL folks in some of the former British colonies in Asia. Their practice is to capitalize every common noun that conceivably might have a proper noun used with it. Thus:
Along this road there is a University.
Each academic Department has several Professors.
That will have to be decided in Court by a Judge.
I don’t think this is a holdover of 18th-century style (at least I hope it isn’t), but a confusion resulting from capitalization when these words are used along with proper names: for example, “University of Malaya.” That does not mean you should write “I’m trying to decide which University to apply to.”
Another thing they do over there that bugs me is they hyphenate everything. They even use hyphens to separate Latin pre-fixes from the rest of the word.
It may be of interest to look at a leading English newspaper. Its style guide is at:
I’ve oft been confused about hyphens and asked this question here, without a real satisfactory answer, other than the trend is not to. here is a site that gives more details.
However, I question the omission of a hyphen in “re-sign” when the meaning is to sign again. I think the hyphen is necessary to differentiate it from quitting.
I agree, the use of a hyphen to distinguish different words that would otherwise look the same is necessary. And I’m a hyphen minimalist. In the story on my web site, I used the word “re-form” meaning to take shape again after having been dissolved into formlessness — so as not to confuse it with the usual meaning of reform.