My sincerest apologies for going "off-topic" here, but I just can not resist myself:

CBS, ABC, and NBC all spell that weird "cuckoo", Gadhafi/Qadhafi/Kadhafi differently....but at least they are consistent with captilalization!

Eric
Seattle, WA
----- Original Message -----
From: Teresa Michelsen
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Sent: 3/30/2011 11:52:17 PM
Subject: RE: [Tweeters] Capitalization of Bird Names


I guess the other thing I'd have to say about this is that newspapers do a lot of weird things with names and capitalizations that no-one else does, which doesn't make them right just because they're consistent. For example, they insist on calling all agencies the "XX department" even though the agencies have official names. It's weird to work for the Department of Ecology, and always see it in the papers as "the Ecology department." My guess is, you'll never win an argument with a newspaper editor over one of these things. In fairness, journals are just as stubborn about their own strange quirks (e.g., reference formats).

Which doesn't mean that people shouldn't be educated over the proper capitalization of bird names. I do say it that way because I've edited for maybe a hundred journals and never noticed a bird name in lower case. People in the field know the rule. This is also consistent with how we write our government reports across a number of state and federal agencies. Bird names are capitalized, except for the part that may follow a dash (e.g., Dark-eyed Junco). Other species are capitalized following the rule described earlier (e.g., only the parts that contain a place name, person's name, etc.).

Teresa Michelsen
Olympia, WA