majuscules in English (was Re: simple ui question)

[Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>]

Al,

Your observation directly contradicts my own. You've noticed that 
diotima has rather aggressively adopted a feature of IM style (or is 
that im style) in her (or his???) posts to this list; but evidence from 
other posts suggests this is strictly an affectation on the part of 
someone who knows quite well what the rules are.

And it's true that over the last few hundred years the trend among 
editors has been in the general direction from upstyle to downstyle.

But what I've noticed as a much more annoying trend is the 
unselfconscious Capitalization of every Noun--Or Even Every Word--by 
non-writers. It's as if there is something about the German rule that is 
intuitively appealing to people who never paid attention in English 
class. Surely, as someone who also works in marketing, er, Marketing, 
you've seen this, too.

Majuscules haven't always been mixed with minuscules, of course, and our 
choices of when to use one or the other is something that is as subject 
to fashion as, say, the Oxford comma or the hyphen. After all, the two 
alphabets were initially developed for different purposes (inscription 
on stone capitals in one case and quill-on-paper in the other); and it 
was a number of centuries before they were integrated in the first 
place, let alone subjected to any sort of consistent rules.

Dick

Al Geist wrote: