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Re: Capital letters or not?



On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Martin Schulze wrote:

> On http://www.debian.org/intro/organization
 ...
> I wonder why "member" is written all in small letters while
> "Secretary" is written with a capital letter.  I'd suggest we use
> the same pattern all the time, that is either capitalize all first
> characters or no capitalization at all.
>
> Comments?

Well, from the point of view of the English-speaking mindset, "Secretary"
is considered an official job-title, and thus gets capitalized; "member"
is considered as being no more than a generic descriptive term for a
class of person, so doesn't.

e.g.:  "I'm Secretary of the local Debian User Group.  I'm their
        secretary; I do secretarial work to keep in touch with all
        the members."

I'm not going to lose sleep over it, though.  (That's because in this
instance, both appear as the initial word of a sentence, and thus get
capitalized anyway.)

msw
-- 
Martin Wheeler       -        StarTEXT - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
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