A WORD, PLEASE:Making a case for using the lower case

Can you come into my office, please? We have to talk.

You see, I’ve been getting some complaints about you. And I think we need to have a frank discussion about your habits. I’ve been hearing all about your abuse of capital letters. Burch, of the Chicagoland area (that’s right, I have a reader in Illinois), told me all about it, how you write stuff like, “Our Company’s new line of Saltines are the BEST around.” And I just wanted to tell you …

Oh, wait. You say that wasn’t you? I’m sorry. Gee, this is embarrassing. It happens a lot. People write to me to ask me to have a word with readers who abuse x, y or z usage rule, and it turns out that the 20 or so people who regularly read this column are not the major culprits.

But now I’ve already researched all this capitalization stuff, and it’s too late to find something you’re really guilty of. (And, no, ending sentences with prepositions doesn’t count. There’s no rule against that.) Here’s what I can tell you about random and arbitrary capitalization: Don’t do it.

In the lingo of the Associated Press Stylebook — the most widely used newspaper-publishing rule book — and the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press’ equivalent in the book-writing world, the word “capitalization” is used to mean uppercasing the first letter of a word.

That is, when they say to capitalize “cat,” they mean write it as “Cat,” not “CAT.” That latter example they describe as “all caps” or they say stuff like “set in all caps.” It’s a lingo thing.

Capital letters are used at the beginning of sentences, for proper names, in the titles of compositions and in abbreviations and acronyms. Just because legal documents capitalize stuff like “Company” doesn’t mean you should. They’re following legal guidelines, not demonstrating how others should write a press release.

Capitals can be used for emphasis, as in, “Rosie screamed, ‘You CREEP!’” But Associated Press style frowns on this. And Chicago prefers italics. So they set a standard that makes this practice look unprofessional.

Acronyms and initialisms use capital letters, but that doesn’t mean every word they represent does. Yes, CIA stands for Central Intelligence Agency, but VIP stands for very important person. It doesn’t become a proper name just because it has a corresponding initialism.

And here’s a little-known fact: VIP is not an acronym, assuming you pronounce it Vee Eye Pee. It’s an initialism and can also be called an abbreviation. At least that’s true according to “Webster’s New World College Dictionary.” Acronym: “a word formed from the first (or first few) letters of a series of words, as ‘radar,’ from ‘radio detecting and ranging.’”

So, according to Webster’s, “defcon” is an acronym, because it’s a “word” formed from “defense conditions.” And “snafu” is an acronym because it’s a word formed from others I can’t repeat here. But BYOB is just an initialism or abbreviation for something that can create snafus of the defcon-threatening variety. According to Webster’s, an acronym can be an initialism, but not every initialism is an acronym.

In the titles of books, movies and other written works, Associated Press style is to capitalize the first and last words, and all other words except prepositions, conjunctions and other small words of three letters or less. So the report I file with corporate will be titled (note: Associated Press says to use “titled” and never “entitled,” though Chicago doesn’t care): “A Brief Discussion With a Certain Nameless Reader About the Bad Habit of Capitalizing Stuff Unnecessarily.”