[osis-core] Yet another beta on formatting

[Steven J. DeRose]

At 15:12 -0600 2003-11-01, Chris Little wrote:
>Oops, I accidentally missed mentioning one of the instances of 
>"Bible" in the documentation that ought probably to be changed to 
>"bible": "XML 2000 on Bible encoding".
>
>Troy,
>
>You have to distinguish two uses of the word.  If it's a common 
>noun, referring to any bible, it's not capitalized.  If it's a 
>proper noun (used in the sense of a title), it's capitalized.  Thus, 
>for example, the following are correct:
>
>(1) I took my bible to church.
>(2) I took a copy of the Bible to church.
>
>While to following are incorrect:
>
>(3) *I took my Bible to church.
>(4) *I took a copy of the bible to church.
>
>We could be politically correct and capitalize them, but know that 
>we would be doing so for the wrong reasons (overly defensive 
>hypercorrection rather than actual grammaticality).  You also can't 
>capitalize "biblical", "bible-reading", or other forms derived from 
>the word "bible" that aren't specifically proper nouns.
>
>--Chris

The Chicago Manual of Style (13th ed.), section 7.84, says to 
capitalize "Bible", and gives no exceptions. So we're on solid ground 
to always capitalize it (the do show "biblical" uncapitalized, 
though); seems to me no point to potentially offend our constituency 
esp. when Chicago says to do otherwise.

S

-- 

Steve DeRose -- http://www.derose.net
Chair, Bible Technologies Group -- http://www.bibletechnologies.net
Email: sderose@acm.org  or  steve@derose.net