Capitals and italics
January 15, 2006
Please indulge me while I obsess over typography again. Today’s topic is capitals and italics.
It’s almost always a bad idea to set any text all in capitals (like, for instance, “ALL IN CAPITALS”). All caps occur in advertising, sometimes they appear on book covers, and sometimes there are rules that linger on from the age of the mechanical typewriter, like the APA Style requirement that manuscript titles must be set in all caps.
In body copy, however, all caps look bad and should be avoided. So companies spell their name “TOYOTA” or “NISSAN”? That’s fine for them to do in their advertising, but in your own writing you should refer to them as “Toyota” and “Nissan,” respectively. The only legitimate use of all-cap spelling in body text are acronyms.
If you include a Japanese word in an English text, please don’t use all caps, don’t use quotation marks (or a combination of both) to mark that the word is Japanese—simple italics will do the trick. In English (and many other alphabetic languages) one function of italics is to mark a foreign word as foreign.
Of course, “foreign” is sometimes a bit hard to define. There must have been a time when both pizza and spaghetti were “foreign” to English; both words (as well as the things they refer to) are Italian. Yet today, everybody thinks of them as perfectly good English words—in fact, no decent English dictionary could do without them—so there is no need to italicise them. The same goes for certain Japanese words: sushi and ramen, for instance, are now English words and therefore don’t need to be italicized. Other food items like, say, ozouni are virtually unknown in the English-speaking parts of the world. Such words, therefore, are “foreign” to English and need to be marked with italics: ozouni.
If in doubt about the status of any given word, consult an unabridged monolingual dictionary: if it isn’t in there, then it’s foreign. If it’s in there but marked as “foreign,” then the word may become accepted as English soon.
The rule that foreign words should be italicised, by the way, does not apply to proper names: proper names always start with a capital letter—the capital letter at the beginning of proper names marks their status as proper names, and that’s it; nothing else is required. Thus, Tokyo is not italicized, and neither is Kamihama-cho, even though the latter will sound a lot more “foreign” to a native speaker of English than the former.
Gomen for venting, ne.
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