I understand capitalizing Marine to refer to an individual warrior; that’s the name of his or her branch, after all. But soldier and sailor are time-honored terms just as is. They’re not members of the U.S. Soldier Service or the U.S. Sailor Department. I don’t capitalize judge, doctor, professor, attorney, or dentist unless using the term directly in front of someone’s name (and sometimes not even then).
I take a back seat to no one in my admiration and respect for the U.S. armed forces. But it seems a bit silly to capitalize their job titles on every reference.
The gov’t capitalizes like crazy. Just today I encountered the trivia question “How does one carry out Sergeant’s Duties?” as if it were a proper name. My head hurt. At least we’re not all this bad.
Elendil’s Heir, unless you work for the Department of Defense or a branch of the US Military, I wouldn’t worry about it. I have had to capitalize Soldier for the last 8 years. Sergeant, Corporal, and Chaplain, are also capitalized. When referring to the Family of a Soldier, Family will also be capitalized. These are just the rules of style that have evolved for members of the Armed Forces. They really don’t have to be applied in unofficial or non-military applications.
Not to make an offensive comparison, but businesses do this all the time. They’ll capitalize or put quotation marks around any term or buzz-phrase they want to draw attention to. It’s about attention and the rules of grammar aren’t particularly important. (“WidgetWorks USA announces the debut of the New Vanilla Widget, a custom Poly Widget blend using Space-Age Spanish Widgetanium!”) I don’t think my colleagues are going to start capitalizing Soldier or Sailor any time soon, so it’s not likely to pass into common usage.
For arbitrary capitalization of nouns, you can’t beat Ken Smith Basses.
I asked Ken why he capitalizes this way, and he claimed that it was to grab the reader’s attention. It worked, I guess. (His site is great, by the way.)
Whether or not it is in the official rules regarding Army correspondence there has always been way too much capitalization in the Army. It has ruined the way I write. I can’t help myself sometimes. Being in the Army has caused me to capitalize stupidly and being a cop has made me incapable of handwriting in anything but capital letters or using pronouns.
I don’t recall it ever being different. When I was in the Air Force, I was an Airman, not an airman. We were all soldiers in the army of our nation (the collective branches), but Soldiers are in the Army.
You understand capitalizing Marine when referring to an individual because that also happens to be the name of the Branch? How is that relevant? Why shouldn’t you have the same objection and believe members of the Marines are marines?
