Re: draft release announcement

[Thomas Bushnell BSG]

On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 11:37 -0600, Trevor Bača wrote:
> 
> The rule still taught in US classrooms for capitalizing titles is that
> the "important" words all get capitals (which comes down to something
> like prepositions and articles being lowercase, with everything else
> in uppercase). This is obvious nonsense. But it's still what's taught
> and still what's -- unfortunately -- expected (as Jan points out).

How is it "obvious nonsense"?  Many manuals of style have no trouble
expressing this rule in clear forms.  The "important words" method is
hard to implement, but convenient for explaining to ten-year-olds.  It
so happens that the American book publishing industry is not bound by
what is taught to fourth graders, and you cannot judge how book
publishers work in terms of the simplified explanations given in
elementary school.

> HOWEVER there are a couple of important exceptions. To start with,
> since this "rule" is no rule at all, the Library of Congress (no less)
> refuses to use it. Pick up any English-language book you happen to
> have sitting nearby, open to the first couple of pages, and look at
> the in-catalog number given there. The title is given in French (or
> international, or whatever you want to call it) title case: first word
> and proper nouns capitalized and nothing else. The reason is that the
> French / intl rule is an actual rule. And so the LOC uses it for every
> book published in the US, usually in direct contradiction to what the
> editor and publisher put on the cover and the spine.

Actually, in German, as is well known, all nouns get capitalized.  Every
country has its own rules.  There is nothing "international" about using
sentence-case for titles; it's just the custom followed in some
countries and not others.

What you are running into here is that the rules for library catalogs in
America are different from the rules for titles in running text or
bibliographies.  This is a consequence of the fact that American and
British libraries agreed upon a common set of rules for cataloging,
which rules happen to have the "sentence case" specification.
> 
> So, my personal preference on this point is the same as Han-Wen's: the
> practice is old, out-dated and ridiculous in the US, even if still
> widely practiced, as Jan points out. For all the careful time and
> attention we spend making sure LilyPond output adheres as closely as
> possible to beautiful examples of notation from the past, I think we
> can afford ourselves the liberty to skip this one particular out-moded
> practice.

Yes, because the best thing to do with standards is to declare that one
is going to ignore them, in the name of inventing one's own standard.
Wonderful.

Thomas

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