Can you really uncapitalize your name?

Why should it? I don’t know whether there’s an answer to that. The fact is that in the U.S., “Mr.” etc. usually get periods. The tradition is that abbreviations get periods. The British tradition is not to use periods, especially if the last letter of the abbreviation is the last letter of the full word.

Back to the OP, this messing about with capitalisation is a major peeve of mine. The ones with capitals in the middle of the word are bad enough, but I can’t stand the ones with no capital at the beginning. Whenever no one’s looking, I change them to normal capitalisation.

Ms have their periods with regularity.

My point is that “Ms” is not an abbreviation.

mL and ML are two different amounts. you can’t put ML at the beginning of the sentence if it changes the meaning of the original,* intended mL.

*is that comma correctly placed? (this coming from a guy who didn’t use any uppercase letters at the beginning of his sentences…)

When a name is just a part of a normal sentence, its words are subject to the normal grammar rules. If it can’t take it without having its meaning mangled, put quotes around it and keep its original style. Maybe you don’t need quotes if it’s clear from the name itself that it’s a quoted name phrase. If there’s still collision at the beginning of a sentence, you have to decide if a proper grammar or a proper meaning is more important to you and your readers.

Don’t you mess with my prefix. It’s usually lowercase and I could give you a cite for it! If I wanted to. :slight_smile:

pH behaves like a merged symbol, just like mL you can’t capitalize it without tearing it apart or changing its meaning. Like a quotation mark, I think it’s perfectly suitable for starting a sentence. You don’t capitalize it just like you don’t capitalize a quotation mark. Or its first half, a quotation mark is two inverted commas, after all.

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong in starting a sentence with eBay. If we need capitals to start sentences, why do we need periods to end them? :slight_smile:

Even if eBay doesn’t look right at the begining of a sentence, EBay still looks wrong. If your grammar tells you to capitalize the first letter, then you also have to de-capitalize the others. Use either Ebay is… (ebay just being another word in the vocabulary), or “eBay” is… (eBay being a quoted name phrase, not subject to capitalization rules).

Yup, I sure can.


Virtually yours,

drmatrix

I see nothing wrong with capitalizing E. E. Cummings, since he himself capitalized it. (The lower case was used on a book-cover where all the other words were in lower case, and it later became custom.)

If at all possible, I would rewrite a sentence so that it did not begin with an irregular lowercase (such as k d lang, bell hooks, barbara hall, or pH, or for that matter [sym]p[/sym]). However, I would not capitalize them at the beginning of the sentence, on the understanding that they’re already breaking one capitalization rule so why not break another.

And I write Ms. with a period according to the Globe and Mail Style Guide.

That was supposed to be the Greek letter pi, which is of course lowercase and means something different when it’s uppercase.

The write bell hooks does not capitalize her name because (and this is a paraphrase from something I was told in an english course) she feels that by capitalizing a name it makes it stand out or become more important than other things. IMO, the choice to not conform to capitalization rules sets oneself off as feeling self-important.

Online, I think that proper spelling and capitalization when it comes to usernames is completely unnecessary.

whoops, that’s writer, not write.

Back to the OP for a minute… Can you un-capitalize your name? yes and no. You can write your name without capitals, and you can tell everyone else to do so, but you can’t make anyone do it. I, for instance, will capitalize all proper nouns regardless of what K.D. Lang has to say about it, and I have always called a certain recording artist “Prince,” even when he claimed that his name was an unpronounceable symbol. Capitalization is controlled by the writer.

In such cases, you may parenthetically clarify your word. For example, you may write, “PH (pH) is a measure of acidity.” But you may not begin your sentences without capital letters. Sentences, in English, begin with capital letters and end with periods. I’m sorry, but that is the ruling of the Usage Committee.

Except that the construction “ML (mL)” probably has yet another meaning. I would read that as “The quantity labelled by the variable name ML, as measured in mL”. Of course, when it comes to that, I’m having a hard time coming up with any sentence starting with mL, or any other comparable unit whose meaning would be changed by a capitilization.

No, you can’t make people uncapitalize (or capitalize) your name. However, if you are able to convince the right people that your name is supposed to be uncapitalized, then that will go a long way towards convincing the rest of the populace.

For example, there was a girl in my high school a few grades below me who apparently had an uncapitalized first name (her last name was still capitalized.) I don’t know if this was her parents’ idea, or her own, but she sure had the school convinced. I was an editor for the school paper, and I edited an article mentioning this girl. I didn’t know her, so when I came to the uncapitalized name, I assumed it was a typo and changed it. Our advisor, an English teacher, caught my “error” and made me change it back. Her first name is uncapitalized in the yearbook, so at least one more teacher was convinced. If you can convince the media, you can probably convince most people.

The ruling of the usage committee? Hmmph. Some libertarian you are. In any case, I always leave it as pH; of course, I try not to begin sentences with it.

I can’t imagine why anyone would begin a sentence with “ml,” though.

Wouldn’t you begin a sentence with “Milliliters” rather than “mL”? You also write out numbers at the beginning of sentences, too–“Ninety-nine” rather than “99”. The abbreviation “pH” is trickier since it is not easily expanded. What does “pH” stand for, anyway?

Probability of Hydrogen, IIRC.

Definiate lack of capital letters here. I’ve called in the National Guard and will be busing in some capitals to integrate your user names.

Potential of hydrogen, actually. As for capitalizing, I would do it properly–that is, “Girls Club,” “Matchbox 20,” etc.–because things like grammar and punctuation supersede a person’s pretentious whims. I can understand writing it in lowercase for the logo or whatever, but actually expecting it to show up like that in print, especially any publications that like to be respected, is absurd.