Morning all
Question about style:
Should it be
Hit ’Em Up or Hit ’em Up
Thank you
Tis
In my opinion, I would say “Hit 'Em Up.” Them would be capitalized, so 'Em should as well.
The English style guideline has this statement:
(4) Capitalize contractions and slang consistent with the rules above to the extent that such clearly apply. For example, do not capitalize o’ for “of”, ‘n’ or n’ for “and”.
It’s unfortunate that the examples given only include contractions that would normally be lower-cased, but I think the rule applies both ways. This might be a good addition to the examples.
7 Likes
Oke thank you Beckfield.
I dont know what to do now: Edit #125959829 - Edit work
it’s so confusing. Should I cancel my edit?
Your edit was already applied, so you can’t cancel it. It will just have to be re-edited to change it back.
Oh, looks like someone already did.
Oke thank you beckfield
Hit 'Em Up - All words in title case should ignore the apostrophe and capitalize the first letter after that if that whole word would normally be capitalized. So, 'Em, 'Bout, etc. all should be capitalized. Guess case erroneously lowercases them.
7 Likes
Thank you Tigerman 
For what it’s worth, the code explicitly and intentionally lowercases 'em - and has done so for at least 15 years. This is the list of stuff lowercased after apostrophe:
* we got an 's (It is = It's), lowercase
* we got an 'all (Y'all = You all), lowercase
* we got an 'em (Them = 'em), lowercase.
* we got an 've (They have = They've), lowercase.
* we got an 'd (He had = He'd), lowercase.
* we got an 'cha (What you = What'cha), lowercase.
* we got an 're (You are = You're), lowercase.
* we got an 'til (Until = 'til), lowercase.
* we got an 'way (Away = 'way), lowercase.
* we got an 'round (Around = 'round), lowercase
* we got a 'mon (Come on = C'mon), lowercase
There’s no info anywhere about why these specific words were picked. There’s been some discussion in the past in MBS-3193 - if people think we should change some of these, we can, feel free to comment on that ticket about it (should that apply to only the ones that usually appear on their own?)
6 Likes
I added my 2 cents to the ticket. It seems to me that the contracted words that should be capitalized are not just preceded by an apostrophe – they are preceded by [space]+apostrophe.
I can’t think of an exception to that.
1 Like
An exception:
The n letter replacing and should stay lowercase in Rock ’n’ Roll, despite being preceded by a space.
Because and is lowercased.
2 Likes
Ah, yep. I guess the exceptions would be “contracted prepositions that are shorter than 4-letters (before contracting),” huh? I think that would make for a pretty short list of exceptions. In English, anyway.
I’m not English but it can feel strange to consider the letter count, for me.
Why “for” and “of” but “From”, etc.
I’m used to it, now, because I’m a long time MB editor. 
But still. It’s not based on meaning, but on letter count. 
3 Likes
Didn’t realize it was intentional. The ones that are contractions of 2 words, I believe, should stay lowercase. Y’All, What’Cha, You’Re would seem wrong as they are really their own words. I was mainly pointing out the first letter if the apostrophe began the word, i.e. 'Em, 'Til, 'Round.
I submitted a pull request to change this, since I couldn’t find any reasoning why this was added (over 15 years ago, so documentation is sparse to non-existent).
7 Likes
I am a native English speaker, and I agree with you. In school, I was taught that prepositions in titles were lower-cased, regardless of length. It was, as far as I can tell, the professional style guides who came up with the idea, and even they don’t agree. Some say 4-letter prepositions should be lower-cased, and others limit it to 3.
2 Likes
The history seems to be that most people instinctively find that it looks odd when very long prepositions (among, between, throughout) are lower-case in the middle of a bunch of shorter capitalised words. And then while the conclusion really should have been that title case is fundamentally quite silly and we should just use sentence case instead, it was instead to put in some arbitrary limit on how long a preposition has to be before it is upper case, despite the fact that this doesn’t really make sense and nobody agrees what the limit should be.
The Chicago Manual of Style held out for ages on lower-casing all prepositions, but even they caved last year and switched to the 4-letter rule.
5 Likes