Capitalizing Seasons

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matt from Stanford, Connecticut, and I have a question about the seasons and capitalizations.

All right, let’s hear it, Matt.

So I’m a teacher, and we were talking about different, like, weird capitalizations,

Like mom and dad and earth and how sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t.

But then I got to the seasons, and I said, well, you know, we never capitalize the seasons.

And then I couldn’t really—actually, I second-guessed myself.

I said, well, maybe we do.

I said, that doesn’t sound right.

So I went to the Internet, as any good teacher would do.

I went to the Internet.

You know, the Internet said, yeah, no, you’re not supposed to capitalize the seasons.

But I couldn’t find a good reason why.

It just seemed to me like, and it still seems to me, like a, you know, this would be a common and proper noun situation.

You know, like day is common and Monday is proper.

You know, so I don’t quite understand why season wouldn’t be common and fall wouldn’t be proper.

Interesting question.

Yeah, I think you’re not the only one with this question.

You probably found that when you were searching the Internet, unless you got distracted by cats.

Yeah.

Well, the Internet couldn’t give a – it just kept on saying it’s not proper.

And I’m like, but why isn’t it?

Very good.

Yeah, and did your students have the same question?

Yeah, I mean, we all kind of wondered why.

They kind of accepted it, as I have been accepting it for so many years.

But it just didn’t make sense, you know?

Yeah.

Well, you’re right.

It does seem like it should be a proper noun, right?

Yeah.

That period of time.

Exactly.

Like the days of the week or like the names of the months.

But these words, fall, winter, spring, and summer, and the words that preceded those in Middle English and Old English, have never been capitalized in English.

And I think perhaps part of the reason is because they don’t derive from names.

They’re not eponymous, like names of the days of the week.

Oh, like gods and such and stuff like that?

And most of the months as well.

Not all of them.

Most of them are also named after folks.

Exactly.

Yeah, they’re more like periods of time.

Yeah, and so there’s a great deal of inertia in English.

I know it’s easy to think that English changes rapidly.

Yeah.

But once we start doing something in English, it is really hard to shake that habit.

And we have this mixed parentage as well where we’ve got the Germanic side

Where they’re more likely to capitalize a ton of nouns.

And then we’ve got the romance side where they’re very unlikely to capitalize anything except maybe the first word of a sentence.

None of the romance languages that I know capitalize the days of the weeks or the months or the seasons.

Oh, well, that’s interesting.

But the other thing I would say to this, there’s an editing forum, an editing group that I belong to.

This is a super common question from beginning editors where they’ll have a dispute with somebody at the office who insists that spring or summer should be capitalized.

And they have to persuade.

It seems like it should be.

A lot of people think that.

Well, I think if you’re using it in something that functions more as a proper noun, like the fall semester or the winter Olympics.

Spring catalog or something like that.

All right.

Well, cool, Matt.

I hope you helped.

You did.

Thank you very much.

And I am so happy to be on the show.

Thank you very much.

And we always like to say this to teachers.

Thank you for doing the hard work out there in the trenches, buddy.

We know how hard it can be.

You know what?

I wanted to say something to that.

You always say thank you for doing the hard work.

And I just want to say that we’re having a great time.

Oh, yay!

That’s fantastic.

You know, and I’ll take all the luck, the good luck and all the, you know, go for it.

You know, you can give me.

But we really do have a great, great time right now.

Oh, that’s nice.

That’s fantastic.

Yeah, I like seeing that.

We’ll rock on then.

Yeah, lucky students.

All right, thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

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