Ruling out overindulgence in capital letters
People don't seem to know what – or when – to capitalize. It's a problem that streches back thousands of years.
Staff
In the late eighth century, the Holy Roman Empire stretched across Europe from modern-day Spain to Serbia. Emperor Charlemagne wanted to convert his remaining pagan subjects to Christianity and disseminate his laws, but this was a daunting task in an age when all texts were copied by hand. So scribes of the era invented a script called Carolingian minuscule, a cursive style made of the “small letters.” At this point, the Roman alphabet was a dual system: Each letter had two forms, the majuscule (A, B) and minuscule (a, b), and scribes were in the habit of making some letters bigger than others – setting the stage for the development of capitalization.
The rules as we know them today were not established for another millennium, however, and in the Middle Ages, orthography was a free-for-all, with scribes capitalizing whatever they felt would help readers understand their text. According to many philologists, the printing of Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible in the 16th century ushered in the beginnings of standardization. Printings of this Bible put the first word of a new sentence or verse in capitals, as well as important nouns such as “Gott” (God) and “Köninge” (Kings). In German, this led, eventually, to all nouns being capitalized. In English, it led to confusion.
English printers internalized the idea that important words should be capitalized – but what counted as an important word? Linguist and historian David Crystal notes that “compositors – to be on the safe side – tended to over-capitalize.” From the 16th to 18th centuries, written English was Chock-full of Capitals.
Nineteenth-century grammarians and orthographers thought that capitalizing too many words led to the “loss of a useful potential distinction,” as Mr. Crystal explains, and created rules to curb this excess. In an 1861 grammar, for example, Simon Kerl declares that the key principle of capitalization is that “capital letters should not be used without good reason, or when small letters would express the sense as well or better.” To Kerl, a profusion of capitals is suspiciously foreign – a “German notion” – and the sign of a poor education. Immoderate capitalization is beloved of “illiterate people,” and much (bad) writing of the period is “so disfigured with them, as to have almost a hieroglyphic appearance,” he wrote.
This is still the cardinal rule of capitalization. In Associated Press style (which the Monitor follows in most instances), letters are lowercase by default, with uppercase letters reserved for a small number of special cases. Newspapers strive to abide by this; social media is turning back the capitalization clock to the medieval period, as we’ll talk about next week.