Any idea where this comes from or if there’s a name for it?
e.g.
“We stopped inviting grandma over for Christmas, after What Happened That Year.”
or,
“Diversifying your investments is universally acknowledged to be a Good Thing…”
The second one may be pseudo-trademarking based on a Martha Stewart-ism; I’m thinking of expressions that aren’t particularly associated with anyone, but get capitalized like that.
Not sure. This could be a variation of Title Case.
I worked a number of years as a typesetter, but never heard it called anything typographically. I think the phrase you’re seeking is Important with a capital I, or its contextual equivalent.
It’s a polite form of emphasis. There are myriad ways of emphasizing something that you want to catch the readers’ eyes, but you don’t always want to put it in a typographically different form: bold, italic, underline, all caps.
Capitalizing words, especially Certain Important Words, signals the reader. And it’s lighter, jokier, more a nudge than a poke.
Where does it comes from? The Germans still capitalize all nouns, and the convention in English until well into the 19th century was to capitalize important words. Look at the Declaration of Independence. The pattern seems quite odd to us today - human Events with no capital “H”? - but it’s that style that’s still with us.
It’s a kind of phrase noun. The capitalised phrase is a unified concept, in which the grouped words have a wider meaning than the words imply by themselves. To stress that fact, the words are capitalised.
I don’t know where the convention came from, but it’s certainly well-established.
I agree with MoL. It’s not for emphasis nor an alternate means of indicating quotation. It is, I think, a way of indicating that the title-cased phrase refers to a thing you are categorising to an extent greater than the words themselves necessarily imply.
In your first example, the capitalisation mimics the title of a play or story or book etc. It is indicating that what is being referenced is not merely any old thing that happened that year but rather “the thing that happened last year that was so dramatic and notorious that it could be the subject of a movie everyone in this family has seen, entitled ‘What Happened That Year’”.
Your second example is harder to pin down, but it is implying that the subject is not merely a thing that is good, it is a discrete and outstanding thing that is good. It is a thing that, were you making up a table of things that happened , you would put in the “Good Things” column, even though you wouldn’t think or bother to put “breathing” in that column despite breathing being a good thing.
Am I helping here?
It is making the phrase seem more important, yup. It does that by making a common noun look like a proper noun, like the name of a person or place.
‘What Happened That Year’ isn’t just some old thing that happened - it’s a significant event that deserves capitalising like you do for Christmas. ‘A Good Thing’ is not just any old thing that happens to be good, but a well-defined concept that functions like a brand name - or at least that’s the impression the writer wants to convey.
“a Good Thing” is not a Martha Stewart-ism, or at least, not in origin. This (capitalization and all) is from “1066 and All That”.
Take another look. I think that the style used in the Declaration is no different than that of the Germans to whom you refer. It’s not “important words”, but simply all regular nouns.
Take another look at the version of the Declaration you linked to. The first paragraph has the noun “causes” in lower case, but every other noun (except pronouns) is capitalized. I got halfway through the document before I gave up looking for a second example. I started to wonder whether “causes” might be a typo.
So I looked for a copy of the original handwritten version. I found one in Wikipedia, at United States Declaration of Independence, in the top right corner. Click on it for a large, readable version. I was very surprised to find that in that version, the entire first paragraph contained only six capitalized words: When Course Laws Nature Nature’s God
I’m not exactly sure what you’re arguing. I said that today we would find human Events odd. Which we would. What we would find more normal is Political Bands and Nature’s God and that is exactly what you do find in my link. However, human, Political and Nature’s are all being used in the same way, as adjectives.
It is not true that English simply copied German in the capitalization of all nouns and nothing but nouns. English typography was far more eccentric and already in the midst of the transition to the style we’re accustomed to by the late 18th century.
If you had cited the handwritten version of the Declaration which had six capitalized words (which I had linked to) then you would have a very strong point. But the version that you linked to DID have “capitalization of all nouns and nothing but nouns.”
I call it A. A. Milne style. Christopher Robin used it effectively; he was a Friend Of Bear.
