Is it used to make headlines/posts more catchy? Does it have any logical explanation?

What Is The Origin Of That?

128 points

That’s just title capitalisation in English. 😅

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case

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119 points

Fucking capitalists.

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5 points

Oh, you.

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12 points
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Interestingly Wikipedia itself does not use this for article titles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Titles_of_works#Capital_letters

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23 points

Fucking communists.

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8 points
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A lot of newspapers don’t do it anymore either.

It’s still used for book titles, though.

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12 points

In thinking OP may not be a native speaker or was massively failed by their educational system, i.e., American.

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4 points

OP is probably not English. Other languages have different rules.

For example, in Italian book titles only have the first word capitalized, e.g.: “I promessi sposi”

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2 points

Same for Spanish, barring any proper nouns

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1 point

Of course, yes! The original title of I promessi sposi was “Renzo e Lucia”, so capitalized proper nouns.

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1 point

Yes, but how is that not a legitimate explanation. There’s enough Americans on lemmy to see a few posts with English title capitalization.

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1 point

In French, it’s only the first word and the first noun or verb (Le grand Sommeil). But almost nobody respects this rule anymore.

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53 points

Here in Canada at least, I was taught in elementary school to capitalize all important words (i.e. other than and, or, at, in, etc.) in a title. Is it taught differently in other places?

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24 points

It’s taught that way in the US as well.

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5 points

In the uk they just teach us about proper nouns

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2 points

Funny thing is, I’m Canadian, and proper nouns was all I was taught as well. “The, in, and, etc.” look weird when they’re capitalized and not also the start of a sentence.

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46 points

It’s called Title Case. There are different rules depending on which style manual you’re using. Some people just capitalise everything. Some people don’t use it at all.

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6 points

and some people like to SHOUT, while others like to ScReAm

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14 points

In all fairness, alternating caps is read in an extremely different way. It mimics an undulating high-low pitch that is frequently used for mockery in English. Can also be represented with a tilde, usually in a friendlier manner.

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16 points

It something that always has been. Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard An Almanack from 1739 uses title case. It was used in illuminated manuscripts written by monks

You’re asking something that probably comes from a wide array of reasons that dates back literal centuries, even millennia.

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11 points

You mean like how titling works? Like book titles and shit? Lmao I don’t see what else you could be asking. Did you think it was some modern trend or something instead of how literary works have been titled since forever?

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3 points
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its called no stupid questions mate, no need to be a dickhead. as other people have said op probably isnt a native speaker and lots of other languages don’t capitalize titles the way we usually do in english.

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3 points

Well for me, I don’t care so much to the WHEN. What I want to learn is the WHY. I’m feeling it’ll be a deep rabbit hole.

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