The other problem with Capitalization is that writers capitalize words indiscriminately. I recently saw that a guy taught Composition in high school. That's great, but why does a subject need to be capitalized? I took journalism in college and never felt the need to say that I took Journalism.
I recently was Proofreading a non-fiction Book, and I found hundreds of Words that were capitalized incorrectly or indiscriminately. Yes, you would uppercase General as in General Norman Schwarzkopf; otherwise, it's Norman Schwarzkopf, a former general.
But the ubiquitous uppercasing of words doesn't bother me as much as poor grammar. I just found "You've probably heard Wilson and I talk ..." online, and, frankly, "Wilson and I" just doesn't cut it. Would you say "You've probably heard I talk about this or that?" No, you'd say "You've probably heard me talk..."
Same with further and farther. Farther is distance -- you ran farther than I did today. Further has more of a time element -- after further review, for instance.
Then there's "between you and I." Two men of letters were arguing in the 1993 remake of the movie "The Sea Wolf." The late Christopher Reeve was playing protagonist Humphrey van Weyden, and the other man was ready to fight a duel. The man said "between you and I," and that fueled van Weyden's final volley. He said something like, "For my weapon, I choose words, and, between you and me, you're out of ammunition."
It was great to hear a snooty guy on a bad version of a classic novel using language correctly. It's a never-ending battle, though. As Rosana-Rosana Dana said so eloquently, "It's always something."
More SpeedEditor blog entries from Tom Gillispie
