Holy Shit: When a sentence doesn't need to start with a capital

Throughout history, many famous artists have painted over their previous work to make a whole new painting. This makes sense, since canvases were, and are still, pretty expensive, and as MC Grammar knows all too well, sometimes you'll be working day and night on a piece of art – in my case, this voluminous blog – and it will be only halfway through that you'll realise that what you're doing is shit.

For example, this is a very beautiful portrait painted Frida Kahlo in the 1930s.

 But what most people don't know is that X-ray images have shown that Kahlo was originally painting this:

Which IS good, but I'm sure you'll agree, isn't as good as what she ended up with. And the painting by Botticelli, which is generally known to look like this:

Is in fact painted over an earlier draft that looks like this:

And just like these examples, it has been recently discovered that a lost Leonardo da Vinci painting has been hiding behind a fresco at Florence’s town hall.

The painting, which is titled ‘The Battle of Anghiari’, is believed to have been hidden for the last five centuries. In 1504, da Vinci worked in the Hall of Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio and managed to complete only the centrepiece of his work. After 1555, the palace room undertook renovations, and the painting was covered by other stuff, which we now realise is a piece of total crap.

Here's a bit of the uncovered painting:

Anyway, here's where shit gets seriously crazy. When Leonardo da Vinci makes it to the papers. When you start a sentence with 'da Vinci', you don't have to start the sentence with a capital letter. Here's an example.

In this case, because 'da Vinci' is a surname that starts with a lower case letter, not an uppercase letter. You can't just make it an uppercase letter because you're starting a new sentence - in this case the fact that da Vinci's name starts with a lowercase letter overrides the fact that sentences are meant to start with an uppercase letter.

I'm sure that I don't have to tell you that this is some crazy shit. But don't be too frightened by this, just let this fact wash over you like a big wave. After all, da Vinci created some pretty dope stuff, like this business:

Capitalisation for titles

As you know, we have once before jumped into the crystal clear waters of how to use capital letters.

But my fans have told me that they are hungry for more information. They have contacted me via twitter, facebook, gmail chat and telegram, begging me to give them more information about how to use capital letters in the right way.

And certainly, capital letters are confusing, not least when you are writing the title of something, such as a memoir you have just written about your life, or a thesis on the mating patterns of salmon, or even a power ballard. Questions you might find yourself asking are "Should my power ballard be written 'The Love Exchange Only Hands Out Monopoly Money', or 'The love exchange only hands out monopoly money', OR should only some of those words be in capitalised?"

Let me explain.

When you are writing titles, some words need to be capitalised, and others don't need to be. The ones that do need to be capitalised are:

•  The first and last words of the title; or
• All nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives

The words that should not be capitalised, unless they are the first or last word, are:

• articles (a, an, the) 
• conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet) 
• short adpositions (3 and less letters long): at, by, for, in, of, off, on, out, to, up
• some Latin abbreviations (most common only): c./ca./cca. (circa), et al. (et alii), etc. (et cetera), e.g. (exempli gratia), i.e. (id est), lb. (libra), vs. (versus). 
• medium adpositions (4 letters long): down, from, into, like, near, onto, over, than, with, upon.

For example

That Tall Man, He Runs Fast!

All these words fall into the first category of words that should be capitalised. On the other hand, a title like:

Who's That Man over there?

Would not need to be all capitals because the words in blue are prepositions, which are not to be capitalised.

Some other examples:

Believing the Lie (i.e.first word/article/last word)

Diary of a Whimpy Kid (i.e. first word/short adposition/article/adjective/last word)  

It Was Just a Bit of Fun (i.e first word/verb/adjective/article/noun/adposition/last word)

These Titles Seem to Be Getting Longer and Longer (first word/noun/verb/adposition/verb/verb/adjective/coordinating conjunction/adjective)

But HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE for a minute. You might have noticed that like some sort of hypocritical monstrous dictator of some sort, MC Grammar himself does not follow these rules in his own blog posts. What the fuck? Well, this is where capitalisation for titles gets hazy, because the rules for blog titles are still hazy. For example, the very fine Julie Burchill, a very long-established journalist, only capitalises the first word of her titles, and any proper nouns that come up, whereas the very funny Cody Johnston tends to capitalise everything except coordinating conjunctions. Both are highly respectable journalists and writers, both are well-school in the fine arts of grammar. So who to follow? Well, the best bet is to follow the rules I have set up here, but just remember that the internet is a changing beast, and what rules arise for capitalisations, we simply don't know yet.

To see us out, let's sit back, relax, and listen to the very excellent Capital Letters, who never mess up their capitalisations of titles, and hope that someday you can be like them.

Feeling Sarcastic? Try some capital letters!

So, MC Grammar has become an exam invigilator. This means that I let kids into exams, then I give them their exam papers and I tell them all the important rules about the exam. Then if anything goes wrong, like a paper with a messed-up question, or a freak-out by one of the kids, MC Grammar is right on top of it, sorting it out, talking them off the roof, returning them to their table, and making a note of all incidents in the special invigilator file.

But just the other day, I noticed something alarming. I was reading my special invigilator handbook, accurately titled General, Vocational and Diploma Qualifications – Instructions for conducting examinations. It struck me as a bit strange that since this was the title of the handbook, they hadn’t followed the general rule of capitalising all the key words, and left ‘conducting’ and ‘examinations’ alone to fend for themselves against a whole crowd of fearsome capitalisations.

But it got worse. Down the bottom of the page read ‘At least one copy of these Instructions must be available in each examination room.’

Why did ‘Instructions’ get a capital letter? Yes, it’s a noun, i.e it is the name of something, and technically the names of things get capitalised, but ‘copy’, ‘examination’ and ‘room’ are all nouns too, aren't they? Where was their glory? Where was their time to shine?

There are some basic rules for capitalising words. Let’s power through the basic ones first, then jump into the big daddies afterwards.

A word needs to start with a capital letter when it is:

1. A day of the week. Take note that the seasons are not capitalised.

It was Wednesday by the time I realised that it was autumn.

2. The name of a language.

Apparently Hungarian is really hard to learn.

Complication alert! The names of subjects in school are not capitalised, unless they happen to be languages.

Today I have geography, maths and Spanish.


3. The first word of a sentence, or comes after an exclamation or question mark.

Have we seen the last of Janet Jackson’s left nipple? Probably not.

The names of festivals, holidays and holy days

Such as Christmas, Ramadan, the feast of Purim and Halloween.

4. Distinctive historical periods

London was a prosperous city during the Middle Ages.

Britain was the first country to experience the Industrial Revolution.The Greeks were in Greece during the Bronze Age

4. The first word of a direct quotation

In my frustration I cried out ‘It has come to this and I blame myself!’ A passer-by wearing a Trent from Punchy shirt comforted me.

BUT there is no capital if the quotation is not a complete sentence.

The mayor described the stealing of his trousers as 'disappointing'

OK, so that’s all fairly straight forward. The next set of rules flirt a little more with the grey area between ‘nouns that get all the glory’ and ‘nouns that nobody loves’.

Words need to start with a capital for:

5. Proper names. A proper name means a name or title that refers to a person, a place, and institution or an individual event.


My name is Tom Baker

There was a fight between Professor Lacey and Doctor Davis

The Golden Gate Bridge is in San Francisco Bay

The Queen is addressing the House of Commons

I’m trying out for the Winter Olympics

This can get mighty confusing. For example:

I have met the President.

Dave is the president of a massive company.

In the first sentence, ‘President’ is capitalised because it refers to a specific person. In the second, ‘president’ is just the description of Dave’s job. Here’s another example.

Saint Servatius is the patron saint of rats.

‘Saint Servatius’ is the title and name of Saint Servatius, but ‘patron saint’ is not, and so gets no capital.

The title of a book, play, poem, film magazine, etc. Basically if it’s the title of a piece of art, media or entertainment, it gets capitalised. Note that words like 'the', ‘of’, ‘and’ or ‘in’ are not capitalised unless it’s the first word.

That movie 'Bully' is messed up.

Just because I haven’t read 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' doesn’t mean I can’t guess what happens in the end.

I enjoy the classical piece, 'Air on the G String'.

Aunt May keeps telling me how losing my virginity will be like giving away a Special Flower.

According to Ben, Fallout Boy are the Next Big Thing.

Can’t you just hear the sarcasm dripping off the page! If you ever want to own someone using the power of grammar, this is all you need to know.

So suddenly, I think I have the answer to why ‘Instructions’ is such a special word, while all the sad little words around it get ignored. ‘Instructions’, unlike ‘copy’, ‘examination’ and ‘room’, not only refers to a specific thing, unlike, say ‘room’, which could refer to any which room the instructions find themselves in, but it’s also the official, or ‘proper’ title of the thing which MC Grammar finds himself holding in his hand.

And so another grammar mystery has been solved!MC Grammar’s personal favourite use of capitalisations is to indicate sarcasm. You might have noticed that sarcasm is generally limited to spoken word, because it mostly gets expressed through tone of voice. For example, if I was to write that I really enjoy the films of Kevin Costner, you can’t be sure if I’m being sarcastic or if I’m an idiot without hearing the tone of my voice.