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Comment by 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 :)

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altairprime

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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.

  • nickburns  3 days ago

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

    Yeah, no. You're just making things up to suit your position like the president does.

    • JumpCrisscross  3 days ago

      > no. You're just making things

      ...this isn't a counterargument. I can similarly assert you're justing making stuff up, which isn't untrue, either way, since we're talking about language, a wholly made-up enterprise.

      What's your contention that the President, within the context of the American presidency, does not refer to a single entity? Is this a preference? Or something you actually believe is incorrect?

      1 reply →

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.

  • JumpCrisscross  3 days ago

    > the thing I'm talking about is not a person

    Countries, companies, religions; hell, planets and galaxies–none of these are sapient. Yet we capitalise them.

    I'll go out into the deep end for a second with a hypothesis: I think we capitalise because it makes printed text easier to scan. The words you need to spend more time on are capitalised because they aren't ones you can just roll through. This is also why the nutter affect of capitalising random words is so distracting–it drives attention to non-standard words that are, with minimum thought, being used perfectly standardly.

    • marcus_holmes  3 days ago

      I completely agree with your hypothesis. And the ridiculous effect that Trump's random capitalisation has, both of making his text (even) harder to read, and of giving the impression that he doesn't actually know how to write English.

      My additional hypothesis is that capitalisation accords respect, something along the lines of "this is a thing apart, something with a name, so we capitalise it". Not capitalising an actual human's name would seem disrespectful to me.