Down with Capitalization Trivia Quiz

Answer: descriptivism

O.O.O.

prescriptivists prescribe how to use language . . . descriptivists describe how it is actually used . . . of course these are not a binary but rather a spectrum . . . and it is dishonest not to admit the advantages and disadvantages of each attitude

funtrivia is a great example . . . and a bit unusual in my eyes . . . it broadly requires proper spelling and pronunciation . . . yet it keeps agnostic about what proper is . . . there are good reasons for doing this . . . like allowing british and american users to coexist without killing each other for spelling it colour or center . . . but it has downsides too . . . like when there are plausible nitpicks where there isnt really a single right answer . . . despite what some people will tell you . . . such as the oxford comma or ending a sentence with a preposition . . . and its been known to happen that two editors will have different opinions on an issue

an in house style guide prevents contradiction. . . what do you do . . . whatever the book tells you to . . . thats why prescription . . . and with it standardization . . . is sought after when youve got a lot of people writing a large volume of works that will appear side by side . . . sometimes being republished out of context next to each other decades later

thats why style guides are beloved by the news and academia . . . linguists generally like to stay firmly on the descriptivist side to prevent glaring biases . . . but there are other vocations with competing interests in how language is used and ought to be used . . . to name a few . . . authors journalists scholars printers publishers adwriters lawmakers lawyers judges logicians scientists translators educators editors technical writers . . . and writers of style guides

Answer: georgian

O.O.O.

the printing of language . . . including its symbols and spellings . . . is referred to as orthography . . . and can be a source of countless conventions and quibbles . . . on the other hand . . . as you can see . . . it is manifestly ornamental

capitalization originates with the latin square capitals . . . allcaps intended to be chiseled into mortar . . . but the desire to be free of its gigantism and rectangulosity was apparent . . . many easier to write scripts developed . . . most notably the roman cursive of the 3rd century . . . whose lowercase orthography influenced scripts in spain italy and france

this populist development is our big clue as to why georgian never needed a lowercase . . . unlike roman script that was first made to beautify . . . georgians had an entirely separate form of script . . . the asomtavruli . . . used for religious text . . . but the modern mkhedruli developed in the 9th century to enable georgian speakers to write

per bryan garner . . . mixed capitalization is to be favored over allcaps because we learn to read by learning the shapes of words . . . which in my opinion . . . implies that all lowercase should be preferable still

Answer: ireland

O.O.O.

i hope this is a source of pride for you irish out there . . . not only were you the first ones to introduce aerated script . . . where pauses were present but inconsistent . . . that being the technical definition of aerated . . . you later introduced script that was consistently broken . . . such that by the 11th century . . . most of northern europe was doing it

its not that latin script never broken up its text . . . but it did so with interpuncts . . . and only sporadically . . . consider how difficult this would be to follow . . . script had to be hand-written . . . it was more ornamental . . . it had inconsistencies . . . and it did not have regular separations . . . reading thus demanded a higher level of focus . . . roughly analogous to reading a wretched block of fully capitalized text . . . reading out loud was much more common during this period for this reason

in his book spaces between words . . . paul saenger gives those spaces no small significance . . . according to him . . . it was this and only this that made reading silently easy . . . so much so that people then began to read not just to utter . . . not just to document . . . but to actively cross reference what they had read . . . as exciting as this idea is its probably wrong . . . thai for instance . . . uses no spaces . . . and thai people can read silently

Answer: the kinges english

O.O.O.

one loose theory is that the apostrophe in possessives is still doing its old job . . . indicating absent characters . . . standing in for the e in the terminal es . . . the apostrophe was originally invented in the early 1500s by a printer named geoffroy tory . . . intending it to be used to indicate omissions rather than possessives . . . this was a time when spelling was loose and literacy was uncommon . . . hence something so picky as a mark indicating possession was not thought necessary . . . a mark that mind you . . . can only be read and not pronounced

apostrophes to indicate possession gradually gained popularity in the 18th century . . . thanks in part to their recommendation in robert lowths 1762 introduction to english grammar . . . use of apostrophes remained nonstandard from the time of shakespeare to thomas jefferson . . . ironically one of the earliest uses of a possessive apostrophe to find wide use was the pronoun it's . . . yes i said pronoun . . . in the 1600s you could rightly have said for instance . . . the dog chases it's tail . . . this was true until the contraction it's replaced tis as a preferred form

Answer: eats shoots and leaves

O.O.O.

the joke is that eat shoots and leaves can mean something very different with a couple of commas . . . the cover depicts a panda bear walking away from a crime scene with a gun . . . truss has been called a grammar fascist by nicholas waters . . . quite an overstatement in my assessment . . . her book isnt even particularly strict . . . it merely points out places where punctuation is indeed meaningful

but this kind of hyperbole is commonly thrown at anyone who believes language could do with a few principles . . . think about it for a second . . . if you just want to not sound stupid . . . or you dont really care about thousands of years of linguistic tradition . . . a style guide or ruleset can give you the yes or no answer youre looking for

deborah cameron is a linguist who has written for decades about her concept of verbal hygeine . . . her term for the compulsion of some to clean up solecisms . . . when you correct someone you suggest that you believe one form of english is more correct than others . . . such as that which is spoken by a certain country race or gender . . . which is a good point . . . a style guide necessarily has to take stock of how speakers use language . . . even if its wrong . . . so every style guide is a little bit descriptivist whether it wants to admit it or not . . . and every linguist must be a little prescriptivist to be understood

on the other hand . . . cameron characterizes the fashion for prescriptivism as a divide between knowledgeable and honest academics like her and your picky english teacher and other such commonfolk . . . beside sounding more than a little condescending . . . it seems like a mischaracterization . . . since the goals of a linguist whos interested in language . . . and the goals of a style guide whos trying to help people use language how they want to . . . are intrinsically irreconcilable . . . yet surely neither could be classed as (now quoting) the most philistine and reactionary anti intellectuals . . . quote taken from verbal hygeine

let me quote from one of those philistines . . . bryan a garner again (quote) . . . in time the facts of what users of the language actually do will settle all disputes but [...] professional writer and editors cant wait around to see what direction the language takes . . . quote taken from garners modern english usage fifth edition

some of us by the way . . . are quite content with sounding stupid . . . and dont necessarily want it pointed out to us . . . you may think im joking . . . but its a legitimate consideration . . . do you assume someone who says something in african american vernacular or appalachian vernacular is too stupid to know that other people speak differently . . . do you think we dont have tv sets

Answer: use the verb do

O.O.O.

do is sometimes called a dummy operator . . . or a syntactic expletive . . . not because its stupid or vulgar . . . but because it has no meaning . . . yet is essential for asking questions like do you want pasta . . . what do you do for work . . . etc . . . this a characteristically germanic feature of language . . . latin and languages that are more similar to latin . . . like spanish . . . would simply ask . . . visne pasta . . . want pasta

latin and modern english are in the minority of languages which are said to be in negative concord . . . english used to lack negative concord . . . chaucer wrote of the friar in the canterbury tales . . . there never was no man nowhere so virtuous . . . the rule never to not use no double negatives started showing up in the 18th century . . . though note that as usual . . . the grammar books did not teach people how to speak . . . and people were patterning themselves on the latin before then

so called preposition stranding is impossible in latin . . . you cannot say in latin that grammar pedantry is something you wont put up with . . . the famously prickly latin lover john dryden popularized this rule . . . he criticized contemporaries on several occasions for their sloppy prose . . . i dont think anyone besides ill informed schoolteachers have a problem with prepositions at the end of phrasal verbs . . . those would be cases like make up . . . or make out . . . or tick off . . . where the verb plus preposition act like a single word

split infinitives are phrases like to boldly go where an adverb breaks up the to infinitive verb phrase . . . many of the great english writers . . . among them dryden spencer and pope . . . managed to avoid them completely throughout their writings . . . latin infinitives are a single word . . . as are spanish french italian german russian greek and arabic infinitives . . . but in english the particle to and the verbs they infinitivize happen to unbidden be . . . nevertheless by the 19th century there were many grammarians on both sides of the atlantic arguing that split infinitives were unnecessary and unattractive

Answer: bearing

O.O.O.

most of the english capitonyms only change meaning . . . rare are those which change pronunciation too . . . these include months like august . . . placenames like reading and mobile . . . and names such as job or ares

the noun snoot . . . a jocular backronym that derives from the adjective snooty . . . was coined with these definitions in david foster wallaces essay . . . tense present . . . collected in consider the lobster . . . an essay dedicated to quote . . . probing the seamy underbelly of us lexicography . . . end quote . . . the essay captures the varied mental life of a snoot . . . introducing his background as a snootlet born to snoot parents . . . and his sincere enjoyment of garners modern english usage . . . about a 3.5 on the scale where prescriptivism is a 0 and descriptivism is a 10 . . . but it also goes into his double life as a liberal arts professor . . . his understanding and appreciation of nonstandard englishes . . . the speech he gives to students speaking vernacular . . . etc

Answer: escalator

O.O.O.

many trademarks . . . i am pleased to say . . . have been legally unshackled from the requirement for capitalization . . . thermos . . . klaxon . . . aspirin in some parts of the world . . . and escalator . . . formerly the intellectual property of otis elevator . . . in a well publicized case . . . otis neglected to protect escalator as a trademark . . . using it without designation alongside the generic term elevator . . . so now no one is stuck calling it a moving stairway

words which become better known than the generic nouns to which they refer are called proprietary eponyms . . . velcro and kleenex and xerox being well known examples . . . companies do not want to suffer so called genericide . . . a term i feel perhaps sounds more serious than the issue is . . . atari and the company who took up its market share . . . nintendo . . . both ran the risk of genericization . . . as editor kyleisalive has had to fix on many a funtrivia quiz. . . there is no such thing as a nintendo . . . which was a real ad slogan nintendo ran for a period

xerox has likewise taken steps to prevent this . . . i now quote the slogan . . . you cant xerox a xerox on a xerox . . . they want you to believe a xerox is the machine that photocopies a photocopy

Answer: allen ginsburg

O.O.O.

ee cummings (tulips and chimneys) often . . . though not always . . . used lowercase in his poems and would not capitalize the pronoun i . . . it is a misconception that he preferred to write his name in lowercase . . . not that thats going to stop me

ntozake shange (for colored girls who have considered suicide) is a book of poems meant to be performed before an audience . . . including the stories of seven women who were victims of sexual violence . . . to feel informal and confessional the libretto is written in ebonics and in all lowercase . . . even the title

rupi kaur (milk and honey) has become a staple of the airport bookstore . . . her gnomic poems basically translate in toto to instagram and facebook etc . . . i would say all three of the poets mentioned use lowercase to convey humility . . . that or a sense they have been injured

allen ginsburg (howl) was a rulebreaker in many other ways . . . he liked to write extremely long lines in his poems . . . did drugs . . . he wrote about homosexuality when it was outlawed . . . however . . . when it comes to the caps lock he was no exception

some other notables to avoid the shift key . . . don marquis . . . his character archy is a poet turned into a cockroach . . . hes the size of a typewriter key . . . ergo he cant use the shift key even if he wanted to . . . another favorite . . . jack green . . . whose memo entitled fire the bastards! is not only a personal favorite . . . but a direct inspiration for this quiz

Answer: lacademie francaise

O.O.O.

the members of lacademie francaise refer to themselves as les immortels . . . the immortals . . . founded in 1635 they spent 55 years arguing over the first edition of their french dictionary . . . since then they have continued to update the dictionary . . . making it decades older than the first encyclopedia britannica or samuel johnsons dictionary

lacademie has increasingly been mocked among both the french and foreigners who are aware of it . . . one of lacademies apparent goals is to prevent english interference . . . but this often results in hilariously convoluted alternatives . . . hilarious because french speakers consistently will not take to them . . . consigned to the waste bin of the immortals are le acces sans fil and le fin de semaine and le dejeunette . . . french speakers stubbornly insist on saying le wi-fi . . . le week-end . . . le brunch

lacademie francaise is not unique . . . the european federation of national languages lists over 30 countries with similar bodies . . . though most are not royally chartered . . . frances is the second oldest after italys . . . and was used as a model for spains real academia espanola