From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 10/30/02-12:32:33 AM Z
On Tue, 29 Oct 2002, Christopher Lovenguth wrote:
> I’ve never really thought about this before and my own use of grammar is
> horrible so I’m getting opinions from all of you. When naming a process that
> is named after someone, do you capitalize it? For example, I make black and
> white prints (not Black and White prints) so do I also make van dyke prints?
> Is it different if I’m talking about the Van Dyke process though? Same with
> Daguerreotypes (or is it daguerreotypes?).
>
> Any thoughts out there?
Permit me to note that in this context the word would be "punctuation,"
not "grammar." Is that nitpicky? Call it a fine point, which of course
is the area we enter.
I've had occasion to ponder this very point in editing, even to change a
contributor's usage. Here's my rule of thumb, both from what looks right
to ME, and what I find as historical usage in "the literature."
Pretty much as already noted: Where it's a person's name, capitalize.
Bob Schramm said in P-F #1 that he followed Nadeau, spelling the process
Vandyke brown. However the Getty book spelled it Van Dyke brown, but they
made lots of little mistakes. They didn't know the field, were just
coat-tailing.
We would write Obernetter process, Mariage, and Talbotype. But why not
Daguerreotype -- I believe the word is more often lower cased. A guess:
the term is so common the capital-letter-ness has worn off.
For a recent article on bromoil, I checked usage in the old books.
Capital "b" looked wrong, was all -- and it turned out Mayer did not
capitalize either, although a (very) few of his contemporaries did. It
seemed, however, to seem slightly grandiose, or did to me. Too holy. Has
anyone else noticed that references to God these days no longer capitalize
the pronoun (maybe it's the he/she thing?) as they did in my youth. So if
we don't capitalize the deity, even by and large the bible (another change
in usage), why bromoil, or platinum printing, or.... whatever ?
Judy
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