When you begin a sentence with the name of a person who chooses not to capitalize the first letters of their name, do you capitalize the first letter or not?
For example:
Bell hooks is a writer.
vs
bell hooks is a writer.
My instinct is that the former is correct, but for some reason I find the latter more aesthetically pleasing.
This isn’t in any way, shape, or form a grammar question. You’ve already tossed out grammar in favor of somebody’s idiot pretense, so who cares?
Where in my OP does it say “grammar” question?
I wasn’t asking for opinions as to whether people like bell hooks are idiots. Thanks for your help though.
Spicy for GQ, no?
Sorry,** HazelNutCoffee**, I don’t know but I often get the same confusion in this eworld.
This doesn’t really answer the question, but I would just rephrase the sentence so that the name isn’t first.
Eh, no need to rephrase. You always capitalize the first letter of a sentence in formal English. I can’t think of a single stylebook that would recommend “bell hooks” any more than they would recommend “k.d. lang” at the start of a sentence.
So, it’s the first, but I’d personally go with “Bell Hooks,” as that is also an accepted capitalization of her name.
Well, if it were some random username or something I would just do what I wanted, but bell hooks is an established name in feminist literature, so if I were to capitalize it simply because I thought she was a pretentious idiot people would assume I did so out of ignorance.
garygnu, :smack: I don’t know why I didn’t do that to begin with.
Hmm, the Chicago Manual of Style has this to say:
I profoundly disagree with that. Why should I recast a sentence just because the CMoS can’t figure out a way to address this matter? Silliness.
It does seem rather silly. Anyway, normally uncapitalized letters are capitalized when they begin a sentence, so I don’t see why names would be an exception. But if they are an exception someone should just make a goddamn rule so we can stick to it.
Eh, I’ll just rephrase the stupid sentence. :: grumble ::
e. e. cummings, another small-case person, deserves the respect of no uppercase.
pulykamell, garygnu, and others on the board, are in lowercase. Some of them even get miffed if you give them uppercase billing, saying, “I am of the common people,” or something.
I’m precise/foolish enough to check on that when quoting a poster.
E.E. Cummings doesn’t care. Apparently it was a publisher’s quirk to lowercase his name.
If you’re starting a sentence with my name, please do capitalize. It trips up my reading to see a sentence not start with a capital letter.
E. E. Cummings specifically asked that others write his name in upper-case.
Not if the cite in post #8 is correct. Admittedly, I have never heard that it was not his decision.
I don’t know about human names, but personally when I have the name of a webstie (mainly eBay or xkcd) I capitalize all letters (since they’re so short).
i.e.
EBAY is a great place to buy pet rocks.
XKCD just put up the funniest comic.
Of course I only use it when I can’t find a very good way to reorder the sentence, if I can I just avoid using it as the first word.
For proper names, I would probably leave it lowercase.
For that reason, I only get miffed if my user name is capitalized in the middle of a sentence.
(upon preview, ditto)
I have this same problem when writing about my favorite Japanese singer. Is it considered pretentious when she romanizes her name using all lower-case letters? Because strictly speaking, her name is 愛子, and to the best of my knowledge Japanese writing does not have the equivalent of upper- and lower-case versions. So she represents her name as “aiko” on her CD covers and other promotional material.
There are times when you have to make a decision: do you want to look right, or do you want to be right? The “correct” way to handle “bell hooks” would be to capitalize the first word of the sentence, giving you “Bell hooks.” That looks silly. If you lowercase both words, you’re violating the grammar rules of starting sentences with capital letters. If you initial-cap both words, you look like you don’t know the name is supposed to be all lowercase.
The solution?
garygnu nailed it: recast the sentence.
Ummm. Make that:
As garygnu said, recast the sentence.
Just cap the first letter. The name eBay is not an acronym, and neither is xkcd.
I don’t know what style manual they follow, but the San Francisco Chronicle recently printed “EBay Inc. said Tuesday that it will slash…”
That’s the solution that will make everyone happy, but it’s such a cop-out. What do you do in a situation where you’re quoting someone who says: “IPod sales are up 30% this quarter” or something like that? You don’t have the luxury of recasting. Oh, I suppose you can got the Mr. So-and-so said that “iPod sales are up…” route, but if you’re transcribing or otherwise need to preserve the start of the sentence? Besides, it’s irritating to me that I have to change a sentence because somebody decides to quirkily capitalize (or, not capitalize, in this case) their name.