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Comment by macdice | Hacker News Reader

Another stupid detail like this that immediately tells you that text is from America is the capitalisation of every word in a title. Compare the front page of the NY Times with the front pages from any other English speaking country and you see the contrast. I didn't check, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Canadians go both ways at random ;-)

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It's less logical even than that. It's almost every word. On the NYT homepage right now, for example, one story is "Justice Dept. Asks Judge to Block Texas From Enforcing Abortion Law". So "From" is capitalised but "to" isn't.

Weirdly, scrolling down the page, the technology section appears to go its own way on capitalisation rules: "Apple's new iPhone 13 is better, but not by much." is followed by "Apple Issues Emergency Updates to Close a Spyware Flaw".

I'm surprised by this, as the Times has a fairly well-followed style book. I'd be curious if this pattern followed in print or if things are just more lax online.

edit: Having just compared, it does look like the content generated online has a looser pattern than the articles generated for this morning's paper.

4-letter-long and above prepositions are capitalized. Can't remember where I got that rule, but they're probably using that; I use it for my music collection.

It's called title case, and it's not determined by the length of a word but by whether or not a word is minor. The rules defining minor words vary slightly between styles, but they're usually prepositions and articles.

I learned it as all prepositions and articles, unless they start the title.

You and APA seem to disagree on this https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/capitaliza... but it's ultimately one of semantics since if your list of minor words are all three letters or less then it's the same.

> Lowercase only minor words that are three letters or fewer in a title or heading (except the first word in a title or subtitle or the first word after a colon, em dash, or end punctuation in a heading)

> 4-letter-long and above prepositions are capitalized. Can't remember where I got that rule, but they're probably using that; I use it for my music collection.

This is the guide I follow, and it would only capitalize preposition five characters or longer:

http://aitech.ac.jp/~ckelly/midi/help/caps.html

Book titles in British English tend to be title case (capitalise most words, apart from "a", "the", etc), but newspaper headlines are usually sentence case apart from tabloid front pages, which are all caps and have their own language ("It's the Sun wot won it", for example).

A weird thing British papers do is de-capitalize acronyms. It's a useful signal for pronunciation, but it's also just...wrong? Like, the agency is called NASA, not Nasa.

The UK practise is for initialisms to be capiitalised and acronyms, which are prounced rather than spelled out, to have an initial capital (when rerfering to a proper noun) but lower-cased following.

So "Nasa", but "FBI".

There's some adoption of this in US English, though typically for words which have fallen into normal use and don't identify specific organisations or entities: scuba, radar, sonar, laser.

The UK style isn't uniform in all cases, particularly where initialism are pronouced with a mix of spelled-out letters and pronounced terms. So "HIV", but "Aids" (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/01/through-posi...). I believe much US military usage falls under this pattern, as with USAMRID or USCENTCOM. In the latter case, The Guardian chooses the entirely consistent ... "USCentcom".

The same source gives us "GBU-43/B or Moab, known as the 'mother of all bombs'". https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/15/us-mother-of-a...

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