I know what you're thinking. Today, she's going as far as to complain not just about the city she lives in, but the whole bloody planet. Unfortunatley, that's another story for another day.Today I'm here to rant on capitalization. A strange pick, but an important one that needs adressing. I've come across many a story, essay, or other various literature in general where a sentence has 'earth' written and it's a non-capitalized word. Why? Why is Earth so often a lowercase noun?
In elementary school, I was taught that words like names and places were capitalized. Is Earth not a place, then? I really was not aware of this.
I mean, for instance, California and Tennessee are capitalized. The same with London or Algeria, and Chicago. All of these are places, with capital letters to start them off. The Earth is the biggest landmass of all. Why not capitalize it? I've seen the word typed/written as both 'earth' and 'Earth', but the former way is what was more common to my eye. So wrong.
The Earth is a whole planet, for goodness sake. It certainly is big enough to deserve the treatment. And the poor thing puts up with its fair share of misery and deserves a little dignity in its name. The whole ordeal just bothers me.
Until the time comes when I see the mandatory and correctness of capitalizing Earth in every piece of writing, I'll continue to roll my critical eyes at the blatant grammatical error.
-Lynne, aka, 'One who complains about the entire planet'
(PS: Earth is also a word used to describe ground. On Jupiter (let's assume it has a solid ground), if you went down and scooped a handful, would it be called a pile of jupiter? The same on Mars, or any other planet. Here, we say, "Oh look, I have a handfull of earth I'm going to throw at you!" (and the lowercase is acceptable). But on Mars would we say "Look at the mars I'm turning over here!". I've always wondered that...
