Meh, my answer to the OP is that if there is a style guide that is specific on the matter, use it. In the absence of a style directive, consider that the principles of good style are based on good logic. We capitalize words at the beginning of a sentence to help visually set sentences apart. We should continue to do so in the absence of a compelling reason to the contrary. A “compelling reason” would be a trademarked name or some other name in which the lower case is an integral part of the mark’s identity, like “iPhone”. I would not capitalize “iPhone” at the beginning of a sentence, but I would make an effort to reword the sentence to avoid the situation where two valid principles are in conflict.
It surprises me that the New York Times could be so idiotic and inconsistent. NAFTA is indisputably an acronym. “Nafta” sounds like the stylized brand name of a flammable petroleum distillate. If they’re going to descend into arbitrary illiteracy, why do they even bother to capitalize the “N”?
You’re ignoring my point. There isn’t any publisher aside from perhaps some avant-garde literary magazine that doesn’t regard starting a sentence with a capital letter important.
How far does this go? There are languages that don’t even have capital letters. Is our hero going to insist that a Bengali publication switch to Latin characters because " " doesn’t represent her identity in the way that “bell (effing) hooks” does?
We are dead a lot longer than we live and at some point you have to make peace with the idea that people get to choose for their own reasons how to refer to you.
We don’t even really know what form of his name Christopher Columbus preferred even if we thought that was important, and every language has its own variation of if his name.
The distinction between majuscule and minuscule letters didn’t exist when Gaius Julius Caesar lived, and neither did the letters I or U. Do we insist on “GAIUS IVLIVS CAESAR”? Do we insist on pronouncing it as we think he would have?
A name is a reference, a label and it’s one that exists mostly so that other people can know what they’re referring to when communicating. You are perfectly justified in deciding how you like to represent your own name or asking that your own family or employer represent your name in a certain way.
But when it comes to try to use a moral argument to bend the entire world to your will just because you like it that way—and having read Bell Hooks’s statements on the subject, that’s her principle assertion—then what you’re really doing is leveraging notions of self-identity into exercising control over the entire human population’s style choices.
Prince did it for a few years, but he had a different motive—he wanted to fuck over a record company who was enforcing what he considered an onerous contract, and when he was free of that contract, he dropped it. That’s a much more reasonable motive than Professor Hooks has.
And if I won’t buy it from an individual, I’m certainly not going to give a second thought if I decide that for my publication I prefer IPhone or EBay or even IPhone or EBay or I-Phone or E-Bay, etc.
And I feel the same way about pronunciation Nazis. “Andrea” is a word with multiple pronunciations. Don’t give me that controlling “It’s AHHN-dria, not ANN-dria” nitpick crap. I have my own accent and pronunciation.
No two people pronounce my name the same way, and you know what, that’s fine. As I said, I’ll be dead longer than I’m alive and I’ll have to give up that control anyway.
Scuba, laser, and radar are also undipurably acronyms. They’re also words on their own. It’s perfectly logical to treat Nafta and Nato as name that are now words of their own, because that’s how they are largely used.
Indeed, I think it’s quite a sensible style to reserve all caps only for acronyms that are pronounced as separate letters, like USDA.
So what? Tomorrow it could be the opposite. There are already trends in informal online language to dispense with capital letters altogether. What’s informal today often becomes formal tomorrow. And someone has to be the avant garde in any trend. Or is it only Wired magazine that gets that privilege?
Sure, but it’s the rule now. Claiming that there is no rule because the rule might change in the future doesn’t change the fact that there’s a generally accepted one now. This is like arguing that there’s no rule about how many balls make a walk because it used to be different in the past.
That’s actually standard style across the pond. You’ll see “Nasa,” “Nato,” “Nafta” in British papers. Now why the New York Times is inconsistent about that, I don’t know.
Good for them. Those languages have evolved their own written conventions for their own useful purposes. English uses capitalization to help separate sentences and improve readability.
I don’t care what you buy, but when you distort a familiar identity that way you’re making it harder on your reader, and that makes it poor practice. The mind is highly attuned to the visual pattern and appearance of letter groupings, and when you write something like “I-Phone” it requires extra mental processing to try to comprehend, and indeed in some contexts the reader may not actually be sure if you’re really talking about the familiar Apple product or some cleverly named knockoff. It’s just bad practice. And, I might add, it’s completely unrelated to a corporation’s self-serving motives to protect brand identity, which is a different issue entirely.
Actually, I was going to add an update about the relative newness of NAFTA to my original comment, but was running out of edit time and didn’t bother. The examples you cite are old terms that have existed for such a long time that the acronyms have become common generic words, and it’s notable that none are capitalized. NAFTA is recent enough that the original meaning is significant and is far from being some generic term; indeed, with the current political situation around trade it might either cease to exist, or might become the Canadian-American Free Trade Agreement, or something else entirely. Ironically, NATO is a good deal older than NAFTA yet there the NYT insists on the correct orthography.
That makes no sense to me. Why should a pronounceable acronym become an overnight neologism while a strict initialism continue to be spelled out in caps just because of an accident of pronounceability? An acronym is an acronym (in the broad sense of being a set of initials for something). Its status doesn’t change based on how it might be pronounced, except perhaps over a very long period of time if it makes its way into the language as a new word. You can’t argue with the evolution of language, but neither can you make those kinds of completely arbitrary rules about it.
Aren’t those the guys that always get the use of single quotes vs. double quotes mixed up?
Yes, this appears to be the case, although the (proper, IMO) all-caps style seems prevalent in North America. Very low-key, those Brits – maybe they think all-caps screams too loudly. And the Economistdoes it correctly.
Four balls make a walk is only a rule if you are playing subject to the enforcesble authority of an e city that has chosen it. If I start my own baseball circuit, I can have my own rule.
In other words it is a rule only within the context of a particular enterprise. And of course organized sports is an obvious example of a context in which variations of style are common.
I personally think it’s aesthetically more pleasing and readable as “Nato” vs “NATO,” although I can understand wanting to keep the caps to remind the reader that it is an acronym. I personally don’t think it’s necessary, but I write in caps because that’s what I grew up with and I’m usually writing to an American audience.
The point of logic in favor of writing it out in mixed case, though, is that it signals to the reader that it is supposed to be pronounced as a word. So, URL could be “U - R - L” but “Url” would be “url.” It’s not like there’s only one set way that works and is logical. Both are logical for different reasons.
again, This is JuSt semAntics. u are just quiBBling over the meaning of the Word <rule.> As i said, a Convention that is adhereD to 99.999% of the time is in MY opinion a rulE+. If U want to call it something else, GO —> aHead*
“E e cummings’ name was written lowercase.” is just wrong.
“EBay is an online auction site” and "IPod is a device that plays music are also wrong. Certainly Apple believes that “iPod” as registered trademark is their intellectual property and should appear always in its trademark form: “Always spell and capitalize Apple’s trademarks exactly as they are shown in the Apple Trademark List.” Proper nouns and brand names are not regular nouns and the way the owner of the name wishes it should appear should be respected.
And as was discussed here before, “MRNA is created during transcription.” would also be wrong. Sure you can write out “messenger” or come up with a different word order if you want, but seeing “mRNA is …” is something you will see and “MRNA is …” is something you will generally not and would grate on many … and for good cause.
Until enough publications break this rule until it doesn’t. Anyone can choose to be first.
The very obvious observation that the vast majority of humans largely succeed in communicating with each other while continuously violating rules and conventions of style guides, or indeed not even being aware of their existence, makes this picture of fragility of human comprehension in the face of very, very minor or trivial variations like those I listed for I-Phone laughable.
Actually, no it is not completely unrelated. A deviation from common style in a company name or brand name is nothing more than a commercial trick to attract attention. And treating that as some holy inviolable rule of communication is just a capitulation to a commercial entity’s marketing scheme.
And as I said before, written language is merely an approximation of real, human communication. People say “I-Phone” way more than they write or read it. The proposition that minor variations like this cause significant confusion in the big picture is not a serious argument. And that’s especially the case in the context of a publisher (and we are all publishers now) choosing a consistent practice for itself.
The term “Nafta” has been in common use for at least 30 gears now. Entire regimes of specialized language, jargon, can’t, slang, and down-hip lingo have been born, grown old, and died in that time.
I bet your sweet patootie that far more people recognize and understand “Nafta” than have any clue what it abbreviates, because they hear and say it way more than they read it.
Overnight? How long do you think it was before “radar” became far more recognized and understood as a concept standing alone as opposed to merely a convenient way to save time writing “radio detection and ranging”? I would be pretty confident guessing that it happened while it was still specialized professional jargon. By the time these things become generally known concepts, the abbreviation is already the actual terminology so far as the vast majority of language users are concerned.
Because this is actually an important function of writing – to offer clues to pronunciation. And in cases like this where it is a technical concept that is already more widely understood and used in abbreviated form, it probably is a more important function than preserving the indicator of abbreviation. Abbreviations very easily become full-fledged bona fide standalone words and they happen very fast, often before becoming popularly known.
You might disagree with it or prefer a different solution, but the last thing it is is arbitrary. It’s an easily articulated, easily understood, and easily followed rule with an easily stated and understood andperfectly logical and reasonable justification.
What percentage of people do you suppose use and understand terms like Humvee, URL, GOP, gif, MP3, DVD, VCR, Isis, etc., without knowing or thinking about or caring about what phrase is being abbreviated? The abbreviations are the actual words, for all practical purposes, and it happened way sooner than the 30 years that “Nafta” has been around.
Tell that to the Associated Press, whose style guide covers a good percentage of English language copy published every day. See here for a Chicago Tribune example, following the style guide. Not just the headline, but look down in the copy, too.
