Capitalization: "But"
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Capitalization: "But"
by Paul C. Bryan
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Just an informal poll at this point:
How many people feel "but" in English titles should be capitalized? Every instance of it I see in my collection, and it just looks wrong in lower case. But it's a conjunction, right? A coordinating conjunction you say? Indeed it is, but there are others that we don't capitalize: * Yet * So Given it may look wrong to the majority of English readers, what if "but" were to join its good friends "Yet" and "So" and be capitalized? Paul Vive l'anglais! _______________________________________________ Musicbrainz-style mailing list Musicbrainz-style@... http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style |
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Re: Capitalization: "But"
by Brian Schweitzer
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The rationale, so far as I follow it, for 'So' and 'Yet' being capitalized is that, while they can be coordinating conjunctions, they both also can be - and almost always are used in song titles as - adverbs. 'But' isn't the only one that's not in the lowercased coordinating conjunctions - the other coordinating conjunction that's not in that list is 'For' (though it gets made lowercase by its inclusion in the lowercased prepositions list).
Specific to 'but', there's not really any good grammatical reason for uppercasing it, that I can see. It's one of the three most common coordinating conjunctions, used as a coordinating conjunction, in English (along with 'and' and 'or'). Also, as you suggest, a capitalized 'but' would look wrong to native speakers. I'd suggest that the reverse of this should actually be done - 'but' should remain lowercased, but the guideline should be extended to cover 'so', 'yet', (and 'for') as also being lowercased, when used as coordinating conjunctions, when not used as capitalized adverbs. Brian On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 5:19 PM, Paul C. Bryan <email@...> wrote: Just an informal poll at this point: _______________________________________________ Musicbrainz-style mailing list Musicbrainz-style@... http://lists.musicbrainz.org/mailman/listinfo/musicbrainz-style |
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