What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?

[Eggcorn]

I've noticed that a few people on this forum, especially new users asking for help with some problem with Vivaldi, don't capitalize the first letter of a sentence? What's up with that?

[Pesala]

@Eggcorn a lot of users dont have english as their first language, and others post with a mobile.

[Eggcorn]

@Pesala Mobile, I can see that. The Shift key might be trickery to use there. But not having English as a first language: I doubt it. If anything, I think that'd make someone more likely to use capitalization! If you're learning English as a second language: You'll probably learn to capitalize the first letter of a sentence, before you'll learn to make complex sentences and paragraphs.

[guigirl]

I presume the incorrect over-capitalisation of your thread title is irony?

[TbGbe]

@Eggcorn said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:

If you're learning English as a second language

Well, maybe they are not actually learning; just using what has been picked up on TV/Movies etc.

Of course, some people are just lazy (to be polite)!!

[Eggcorn]

@guigirl said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:

I presume the incorrect over-capitalisation of your thread title is irony?

No. Frankly, I'm not too clear on what the capitalisation rules are for titles. I thought you were supposed to capitalize the first letter of every word in a title, except "basic" (for lack of a better term) words like "the" and "not". But I could be wrong, I really should look that up.

Anyway: There's a difference between being unclear on capitalisation rules for titles, and not capitalizing the first letter of a sentence.

[Pesala]

@Eggcorn said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:

I'm not too clear on what the capitulation rules are for titles.

You got it right. It is called Title Case. Ideally, everyone would use it for Topic titles — I believe the rule is capitalise every word except prepositions and conjunctions.

[stilgarwolf]

In googlish there are no capital letters.

[guigirl]

@Eggcorn It's hard to keep a straight face reading you here. IMO anyone who wants to cast aspersions on strangers' English [or any other language, as circumstances dictate] needs to familiarise themselves pretty robustly with the glass houses stone throwing aphorism, then ensure their own spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax etc are all pretty damn good. Otherwise... egg, face.

Here, fyi, i see ample omelette material...

@Eggcorn said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:

I'm not too clear on what the capitulation rules

Ordinarily I'd not have pointed any of this out to you, except you have pretty much invited it.

[potmeklecbohdan]

@Pesala said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:

Ideally, everyone would use it for Topic titles

Are they names? I thought they were just summaries of what the topic is about.

[Eggcorn]

@guigirl There's a big difference between not being clear on capitalisation rules for titles, and not capitalizing the first letter of a sentence! If you can't see the difference, I can't help you.

[Eggcorn]

@potmeklecbohdan That's what a title is, a summary of what the topic (or book, or article, or whatever) is about.

[potmeklecbohdan]

@Eggcorn Yeah but there is a difference between a title & a name. A title is semi-random & doesn’t need to be preserved in its exact form while a name is always the same.

[guigirl]

@Eggcorn said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:

capitulation

Gee willywackers, such fun times.

[Eggcorn]

@potmeklecbohdan Perhaps, but I think I'm missing your point.

[potmeklecbohdan]

@Eggcorn The topic title is just a summary that can be transformed & it’s still the same topic (it isn’t a name & there’s no reason for over-capitalisation). The name of a book should stay unchanged (& hence in English it should be over-capitalised / Title Cased).

[Eggcorn]

@guigirl To be honest: After thinking about what you said more, I'm disturbed by your mentality. You seem to be saying that I have to be perfect, to criticize anything or call for anything to be better. That I have to always eat right and get proper exercise, before I can tell people not to drink bleach (and yes, there are people who drink bleach). That I have to always use a VPN, a proxy, and the Tor network, before I can suggest a privacy-respecting browser such as Vivaldi. That I have to have perfect grammar, before I can expect people to capitalize the first letter of a sentence.

And that mentality, it gets in the way of progress. Because nobody's perfect! So no one can ever have standards, offer advice, or say that we need to improve anything.

[guigirl]

@Eggcorn More barrel-fishing.
Hole
Bottom
Digging
Stop

[Eggcorn]

@guigirl I'll point you to the comic "Mister Gotcha" by Matt Bors. It uses humor to make the point I made, in my last post. But I don't really expect it to convince you, I think we're not going to see eye-to-eye on this.

[Eggcorn]

@potmeklecbohdan said in What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?:

The topic title is just a summary that can be transformed & it’s still the same topic (it isn’t a name & there’s no reason for over-capitalisation). The name of a book should stay unchanged (& hence in English it should be over-capitalised / Title Cased).

I don't think so. This thread has a name, and that name isn't "Why aren't People Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?". I could have named it that (that name would have worked just fine), but I didn't. I named it "What's with People not Capitalizing the First Letter of a Sentence?". And shouldn't the name of a thread should stay unchanged, unless there's some reason to rename it?