ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

what's next? anyone fancy a good-humoured fight about semicolons?

no, thought not.

– — ... hey, courier doesn't display a difference. i assume times does ...

[posts to check]

casuistry: that's a good point, although i'd like to investigate further. if you do remember the specific term, could you post it here?

Also, I think it's Help! ;-)

I apply Morbius's rule when it comes to, for instance, periodicals, in which the title is enclosed in italics, and you have the difference between The New York Times and Chicago Tribune based on what's actually on the masthead.

The reasoning behind using the cap tends to be that something like "The Beatles" is a proper title, in much the same way that The Stranger is the title of a book.

The reasoning behind not using the cap tends to be that it makes your text smoother, allowing you to elide the difference between your definite article and the thing itself's. Just as you would write "a recent Newsweek article," you're able to write "a recent Believer article," even though you'd otherwise notate that publication as The Believer. Nobody wants to write "did you read the The Believer article about Virgil." And it's even more important when you want to use a different type of article: neither does anyone want to say "I really like this The Beatles song called 'Julia.'"

There are all kinds of slippages here on all kinds of related issues. Sometimes it's unclear how much the entity itself considers the article to be a part of its name. If the letterhead for an organization reads "The Socialist Brotherhood," you don't know if they're capitalizing "The" as part of the title or just because it's the first word of the heading -- the text below may well say "due to lack of funds, the Socialist Brotherhood is closing its office." There's also a text called Oxford English Dictionary -- no "the" -- but we wouldn't refer to it like normal books; we say "check in the Oxford English Dictionary," even though we wouldn't say "have you read the Gravity's Rainbow." (The formulation we want is obviously "check in THE ... DICTIONARY.") Sometimes the subjects specify -- Ohio State University let everyone know a while back that they're not Ohio Statue University, but rather "The Ohio State University," capital "The," no matter where in the sentence you're using it.

I prefer being really flexible about eliding it, especially in spots where it's going to come up a lot, like when talking about bands.

And there are some publications where this is still flexy, like the kind of magazine things I was talking about ("I saw this great Nation article about..."), or with classic floating-the texts, like Homer's (the Iliad? The Iliad?).

xpost of course

widely ignored convention in the UK is that you don't cap the 'the' for newspapers EXCEPT The Times

in Ken's counter-example it shd be "butcher's shop" (or just "butcher's" or indeed "butcher"), unless it is a single shop in which a number of butchers trade independently, in which case "butchers' shop" (as per grimly) or "butchers shop" (as per martin) are equally good. I prefer the second bcz i wish to strip the lil bleeder aht of everyfing i hate it so

It's true that -- when stand-alone -- "A man jerks off their own penis" emphasises the sense of a generalised rule more than ""A man jerks off his own penis" or even "The man jerks off his own penis" but frankly it's never going to BE stand-alone, and context will (well, should) do the work of revealing which is meant. ALSO: It is a rule easily falsified.

Also it's worse than that, Mark, the school is actually asking that you refer to them -- mid-sentence -- as The Ohio State University. With the cap. (The one thing you can say to their credit is that they're a business, and businesses have been known to do much nit-pickier things in the creation of brand image and the protection of trademarks. There are still all kinds of weird things where a business, say, capitalizing one letter in a product name would actually violate someone else's service-marked product name, or whatever.)

I am trying to think of an exception/example where a non-quote non-ital title really does manage to successfully claim its article. There's surely something.

I recently ran something where I wanted to describe a band as being in tune with the demographic of (ahem) the publication titled The Wire, but the editor changed my usage -- "Wire-friendly" -- to the more proper "The Wire-friendly." (I'm not sure if, per CMOS, you'd use an n-dash in that latter forumation.)

I kinda miss Se7en: other mag started doing it for a while, even when we'd stopped. S&S still omits the colon implied by the line break, which I hate eg Robin Hood Prince of Thieves

I thought this said, "the Beatles or The Beetles?" and laughed. 'Hoo boy, nobody's made that joke since 1963...oh wait.'

Although this is weird: I was convinced that "old-school" was hip-hop slang that somehow wormed its way into mainstream usage within the last ten years or so! Webster's marks its first usage as 1803!

Important statement: I've never worked anywhere that didn't route something or other in cross-it-off fashion.

More important question: where would one acquire classics of copyeditor porn, such as Sorority House Style, Cap that Ass, Stet Me Hard, Big Black Bullet Lists, and Little Non-Hyphenated Adverb/Adjective Modifiers with Big Hard Hyphens?