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:

Prefixes: the fuel belt of your words

Recently, MC Grammar agreed to participate in a 10 kilometre marathon.

There's nothing I enjoy more than a marathon. The way your heart skips and pulses, the way the fresh air rushes through your lungs, the way your parachute pants flap in the wind; but I also respect the harsh deal that nature strikes with us pathetic, fallible humans and our constant need for water, so I never attempt a marathon without the use of my handy fuel belt.

As you can see, the fuel belt provides me with two water bottles at the front, so I can have a quick burst of water whenever I'm trying to break through the pain barrier.

And just like my fuel belt, a prefix is something that attached to the front of another word to add something to it.

A prefix is attached to the start of a word, and partly indicates its meaning. Common prefixes include anti- (against), co- (with), mis- (wrong, bad), and trans- (across).

Most prefixes are generally connected to the rest of the word, such as mistake, transvestite and disbelief. However, you need to use a hyphen between the prefix and the rest of the word in these situations:

• the rest of the word attached begins with a capital letter, as with anti-Stalin, or

• the same vowel as the prefix ends in, as with: anti-inflationary, de-escalate, micro-organism.

So as you can see, prefixes are the fuel you need to refine or change a word.

MC Grammar out!

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.