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  EDline Vol. 9, no. 6   (7 March 2004)

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

         Q & A
  [2zo]  Why italicise ship names?

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

         Date: Wed, 3 March 2004
         From: Michelle Barson, michelleb@games-workshop.co.uk

Can anyone please tell me the origins of the convention of
italicising ship names? I understand this is standard in the
English language but cannot find the reasoning behind it... is it
perhaps to do with having attached a gender to ships, ie, they
are female in our eyes? Why ship and vehicle names but not, say,
building names?

I'd be very grateful for any assistance as I have been asked this
by some staff members and cannot find the answer anywhere.


         -------------------------
         Date: Thurs, 4 March 2004
         From: Kathleen Lyle, edserve@klyle.demon.co.uk

It's a convention, it doesn't have to have a reason!

Seriously, I imagine it may have arisen because ships are often
named after people, real or mythological. A sentence such as
"Ulysses was 10 miles away" or "Franklin D. Roosevelt was just
coming into view" could be misinterpreted if you didn't italicize
the name. (I don't know if there is a ship called FDR, but it
sounds a likely name for a US aircraft carrier.)


         -------------------------
         Date: Thurs, 4 March 2004
         From: Chris Shaw, Chris.Shaw00@BTinternet.com

Kathleen Lyle wrote:

> a ship called FDR, but it sounds a likely name for a US
> aircraft carrier.

Spot on. USS _Franklin D Roosevelt_ was indeed an aircraft
carrier. See

  < http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-f/cvb42.htm >


         -----------------------
         Date: Fri, 5 March 2004
         From: Robert Ritter, Robert.Ritter@oxcis.ac.uk

In the end it all comes down to convention---and a reasonably
recent one, too: none of this was standard practice even a
hundred years ago. It would be nice to think that someone chose
italics for ships' names to avoid confusion with real names, but
in practice the names of most ships aren't of people, and
typography tends not to be that intentionally kind. One could
accomplish the same thing by bunging it into quotes (as in the
past), and anyway ships named after people are usually preceded
by a definite article, which would avoid any possible confusion
even without italics or quotes: 'Queen Elizabeth II boarded the
Queen Elizabeth II'. 

(Yes, I know some people's names start with a definite article,
and it is precisely these people who habitually have ships named
after them, but malicious indeed is the editor who intentionally
kludges together an undifferentiated 'The Princess Royal was
examined by The Princess Royal'.)

One could concoct an overarching logic---that a ship's name is a
title unique to it and, like the titles of other things (books,
films, periodicals, albums, spacecraft, works of art, etc.), it
is common in print to italicize and capitalize it. Classes,
models, or types of things tend to be roman capped, and only
nicknames, or ad-hoc designations applying to more than one thing
within a class, model, or type, tend to be in quotes. So:

  'Charles "Lucky Lindy" Lindbergh flew the *Spirit of St Louis*,
  a redesigned Ryan M-2 monoplane powered by a single Wright J-5C
  "Whirlwind" engine.' 


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