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Comment by nickburns

3 days ago

Friendly advice: please don't capitalize random common nouns like the president does. It's a marker of one's affinity toward precision (among other things).

33 comments

nickburns

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danaw  3 days ago

you're being this pedantic about someone capitalizing "President"?

  • altairprime  3 days ago

    It’s not a proper noun, and this is HN: pedantry is par. “The president of Xyz” capitalizes the X in Xyz(pn) but not the P in president(n). However, the P in President(pn) is capitalized when it’s a Title suffixed to a Name - but that varies per country by what they title their president-equivalent locally and isn’t always translated, while the concept-slash-role label of ‘president’ in English generally does not (and is often used interchangeably, albeit somewhat wrongly, for ‘monarch’ and other such single-person executive-leader roles). (That we use the same spelling for both title and concept is annoying, as usual :)

    • JumpCrisscross  3 days ago

      > It’s not a proper noun

      The President, within this context, identifies a single entity. As such, it is a proper noun.

      Analogy: there are many continents. But if we're discussing Brexit, the Continent is a proper noun. I don't think it's incorrect to not capitalise. But it's certainly gramatically okay, and not in the same bucket as The Nutters who capitalise Random words it Looks like Legalese.

      5 replies →

    • marcus_holmes  3 days ago

      I was just talking about this today:

      I have an internal convention to not capitalise LLMs when talking about them as if they were people; so claude is not capitalised, and the internal LLM-based service agent we're building, rex, is not capitalised.

      I realise this breaks the capitalisation of proper nouns; claude is a name and therefore a proper noun and therefore should be capitalised. But I like that there's a signal in here that the thing I'm talking about is not a person and so we don't capitalise the name (I realise that cities or companies or other things that we capitalise are also not people).

      Digression, but then so was the entire discussion on capitalisation.

      7 replies →

  • nickburns  3 days ago

    Yes. But mostly just because it's in reference to this particular president who's a dullard and displays it regularly in this particular way.