Head case

Some things should be easier than they apparently are. Pardon me while I fulminate about something as trivial as the capitalization of words in titles, but title case is going to turn me into a head case.

The Chicago Manual of Style, which is not the only style manual in the world but is a standard one that many editors refer to on such matters, has a clear and unambiguous instruction for capitalizing words in titles. The Chicago rule is consistent with what I learned in elementary school and so I assume it is not radically different from longstanding traditional practice. I quote it here, from the fourteenth edition of the manual (because I like that one better than the current, fifteenth, edition):

“In regular title capitalization, also known as headline style, the first and last words and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions (if, because, as, that, etc.) are capitalized. Articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, for, nor), and prepositions, regardless of length, are lowercased unless they are the first or last word of the title or subtitle. The to in infinitives is also lowercased.…”

That is not a particularly hard rule to remember; however, for those who find it difficult, the option of LOOKING IT UP remains available.

Note in particular the phrase “and prepositions, regardless of length.”

[By the way, I have chosen to use what editors call downstyle and what Microsoft Word calls sentence case in this blog, which means that I capitalize only the first word of headings. That’s just a choice I made; I have nothing against title case in principle and I use it often in work for my clients.]

Okay, back to my fulmination. The newspaper of record, the Gray Lady herself, the [cough] infallible New York Times routinely prints headlines that look like this:

Taking to the Streets,
For Parents’ Sake

The Gender Gap
At School

Jocks
And
Prejudice

I do not mean to suggest that the paper does this consistently. They also use downstyle heads and correctly title cased heads. They have no consistent style at all, in other words. I have been noticing this for a while.

Here, see for yourself, in a front page from a few years ago.

Now—and this is what prompts the present rant—I am sitting here reading William Safire’s “On Language” column from Sunday; and he-of-all-people quotes (accurately?) a headline from another paper altogether, the Washington Times: “Olmert Asks for a Word With Bush…”

As I said, this should not be hard. If Microsoft wanted to, they could even make it automatic when someone selects title case in Word (instead of capitalizing every word, as is currently the result of making that selection). In other words, there is no reason that a newspaper typesetting system cannot automatically set headlines according to a consistent style. This is not rocket science. Maybe it is brain surgery, though, involving heads as it does.

Sometimes it’s hard to just sit down and read the paper for pleasure, y’know what I mean?