Sometimes you hear a person say "small 'd' democratic" to differentiate from Democratic, as in the Democratic Party. In these days of Republican rejection of the idea of democracy in general, it seems somewhat important to make sure people know which kind of democratic/Democratic one is talking about.
In today's Star Tribune (and possibly in the New York Times, from which the original column came) there is an editing error that I must nitpick because it feeds into this confusion:
Why is that "D" capitalized, given the Star Tribune's general use of lower case in its headlines? The rule, according to AP and most other style guides, is that capital letters on the first word following a colon should be reserved for complete sentences. This is not a complete sentence.
In this example, the capital D adds confusion to the meaning of the headline. Does the writer mean democratizer (small "d" democracy) or Democratizer (maker of Democrats)? Republicans would like to know, and jump to different conclusions based on the answer. The writer, given what I know of her, would not intend the latter meaning.
Meanwhile, I suspect the culture implied in the headline, article, and book the two refer to would more accurately be spelled Culture with a capital "C" (what is sometimes called "high culture" or "high-brow culture"), because it's not possible to crush culture in the anthropological sense. Culture in that sense just changes and becomes something else: It's always something humans create.
Only people with an idea that culture is a specific set of artistic artifacts think it can be crushed.
No comments:
Post a Comment