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  EDline Vol. 8, no. 87   (8 September 2003)

  Editorial mailing list (digest version)
  Published by the Electric Editors
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  Contents:

         Q & A
  [2yl]  "Is" or "is" in titles?

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---[2]-- Q & A --------------------------------------------------

         Date: Thurs, 4 Sept 2003
         From: Sheila O'Kelly, okellyhs@indigo.ie

Susan Bramson wrote:

> What about articles- a, and, the? I thought they were always
> lower case in titles.

David Ibbetson replied:

> Not if they are part of a name.
>
>   Error in The Times

David Kenning wrote:

> I've generally been led to believe that The Times is a special
> case and that all other newspapers take a lower case 'the' in
> running text, including headlines.

In Ireland the common practice is: if you are writing about your
own newspaper in your own newspaper it is The Irish Times. But if
you are writing about any opposition newspaper it is lower case.
So when I worked at The Irish Times we used the Irish
Independent. Egotism gone mad or what!


         ----------------------
         Date: Mon, 8 Sept 2003
         From: Beck Laxton, becklaxton@yahoo.com
 
I used to work on music magazines, and we had the same query
about whether to say The Beatles or the Beatles (and all the
similar band names). My editor's ruling was that you used a
lower-case t, because when a reader sees a capital 'The', they
expect it to be the start of a sentence; if it's mid-sentence
they get slightly misled. Mid-sentence capitals get very wearing,
too: they're a distraction. And for a word so unimportant, this
seems a bad idea. So we stuck to lower-case ts for anything
called the something. I use the same rule for newspapers.


         ----------------------
         Date: Mon, 8 Sept 2003
         From: Katie Lewis, katie@farnfilm.com

Beck Laxton wrote:

> My editor's ruling was that you used a lower-case t, because
> when a reader sees a capital 'The', they expect it to be the
> start of a sentence; if it's mid-sentence they get slightly
> misled.

They'll have changed that for The The, presumably.


         ----------------------
         Date: Mon, 8 Sept 2003
         From: Caroline Petherick, caroline@the-wordsmith.co.uk

I would go for whichever version the owner of the name preferred.


         ----------------------
         Date: Mon, 8 Sept 2003
         From: Beck Laxton, becklaxton@yahoo.com

Caroline Petherick wrote: 

> I would go for whichever version the owner of the name
> preferred.

... but the owners of the name *always* want a capital letter.
One step on from that, and they're putting their brand name all
in capitals, like AIR MILES, in an attempt to give it even higher
status. 


         ----------------------
         Date: Mon, 8 Sept 2003
         From: Robert Ritter, robert.ritter@oxcis.ac.uk

Periodicals especially often have a house style governing how
their name appears in print within their own publication, ranging
from capitalization of the definite article to capitalization of
the whole name, or small caps or bold, or a separate typeface
altogether. 

There are different approaches to how one standardizes these
things as a third party, free from corporate posturing. Oxford
style, which used to be a bit quirky on this, is now normalized
to capitalizing any definite article in a two-word periodical,
but not capitalizing (or italicizing) it in longer titles; cf.
*The Times*, *The Economist*, *The Library*, but the *Sunday
Times*, the *Bombay Times*, the *New Yorker*. 


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