twostrokenut
Well-Known Member
Why would this style manual have anything to do with the original text of the constitution?
"Capitalization is one of the facets of language that is more varied from language to language, and the rules defining capitalization are more liberal than other rules in American English. In some languages, such as German, all nouns are capitalized. In English the same practice was in place until around 1800."
http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-4355.html
"What capital-ist Tea Partiers fail to realize, however, is that their orthography imitates not Thomas Jefferson and James Madison but the far-less famous Timothy Matlack and Jacob Shallus—a couple of secretaries. No one played a larger role in crafting the Declaration and the Constitution than Jefferson and Madison, respectively, but it was Matlack and Shallus who hand wrote the official, signed versions of these documents and freely recapitalized them as they saw fit. By contrast, in Jefferson's drafts of the Declaration, there's a striking absence of caps—he writes "life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness," for example. As H.L. Mencken noted, "nature and creator, and even god are in lower case."
In the century prior to 1765, nouns were generally capitalized. (The reason for this is now obscure; Benjamin Franklin hypothesized that earlier writers "imitated our Mother Tongue, the German.") By the Revolutionary War era, however, chaos was the rule. Everyone, it seems, had a different style, and individual authors vacillated from one sentence to the next. The old heavy-caps system still appealed to many writers, including some Founding Fathers: When Adams made a personal copy of Jefferson's draft, he wrote, "We hold these Truths to be Self evident; that all Men are created equal and independent.""
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2010/11/capital_embellishment.html
The second article is quite a bit longer and more thorough, so I highly suggest continuing it.
either of those statutory or otherwise lawful? Ok I won't bother then, thanks....also start signing your name on your business cards in all lowercase your customers will love it and think of you very competently.