Headline Capitalization

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, is this Grant?

This is Grant. Who’s this?

Hi, Grant. This is Gay Macy. I’m in San Diego.

Hi, Gay. Welcome to the program.

Thanks.

What can we help you with today?

Okay, this is a funny one.

I worked at a law firm for about 20 years in San Francisco.

I did a lot of document review, fact-checking kind of things,

And so it kind of caught my eye,

And I don’t know if this has been going on for a while and I was oblivious

Or if it’s a sudden change,

But I noticed in titles of things, like I was at the checkout counter, I get The Atlantic, I get San Francisco magazine,

And I noticed that on the cover when they put titles of stories, it used to be that you would initial cap kind of the important words,

You have the nouns and verbs, and some of the smaller things would be capped.

But now I’ve noticed that everything gets initial caps.

So I was kind of wondering, when did that happen?

So we’re not talking about the National Enquirer and the Star and the Weekly World News and those sorts of…

I only read those at the hairdresser.

I see.

We’re talking about a wide variety of considerably well-edited newspapers.

Literary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I would consider it a literary level.

Okay.

Very good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I know what you’re talking about because the rules we learned were different, right?

I’m thinking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like you capitalize the first letter and the last letter.

Right.

And then nouns and verbs.

And adjectives, but you don’t capitalize prepositions.

They come in the middle of the headline.

Exactly.

And it almost made telegraphic sense, like, you know, man bites dog,

But you wouldn’t say man bites the dog on the, you know.

So the telegraphic thing is missing now.

Right.

So I’m not sure.

Is that a new thing?

Well, it’s interesting to see how these rules are changing in different venues.

And again, I think the thing that messes us up is that we get taught in school to capitalize book titles this and that way.

It’s interesting to watch.

I hadn’t noticed The Atlantic, but I’m looking online and I see what you mean, that every single one of those is capitalized.

You know, it’s The Atlantic.

It’s a literary light.

If anyone’s going to do it properly, the New York Times and The Atlantic would do it.

Well, hold on a second.

This isn’t a matter of proper, right?

This is a matter of style.

This is a matter of institutional choice.

It’s not an accident that they’re doing it this way.

It just seems from, we have something called the Blue Book,

Which had all these rules in it for doing citations, legal citations,

And it included capitalization.

And I’m sure the AP Stylebook has something similar.

So I don’t know.

I assumed it was a grammatical rule, but it is capitalization.

So I’m not sure if it’s a rule or a style.

The Union Tribune here in San Diego, they had a redesign recently,

And a lot of their headlines are now all caps.

Yeah.

So it’s an institutional style that they do for aesthetic effect.

And you may be right.

You may be 100% right.

It may affect your ability to understand what is most important in that headline

Because the capitalized words aren’t standing out the way they did.

Right?

If the word of and the word the are capitalized,

They’re kind of like taking away a little bit of oomph away

From the more important stuff happening in the sentence.

Yeah, but I understand what you’re saying, Gabe.

I mean, it’s nice to have that predictability, right?

That thing that you can depend on.

It’s just funny.

It just caught my eye because I’m used to seeing things that look like book titles.

Like in the olden days when you looked them up in the library card catalog and they were written a certain way.

Exactly.

And they just looked right.

Yeah, you get accustomed to that.

I think that’s it.

Yeah.

I think that’s it.

So it just suddenly, for some reason, rearranging things, I really looked at it and went, oh, gosh, that looks different.

Exactly.

I wonder when that happened.

So, Gay, you and I are going to have to just sort of stretch our brains a little bit more.

Do some mental yoga.

I like that, though. I think it’s good to stretch our brains and go for new things.

But I thought, you know, Grant and Martha would know about this.

Well, thanks. Thanks very much for running with that one. That was kind of fun.

Okay. Thank you for calling, Gay.

Thanks, Gay.

It’s really interesting.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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