These words are lowercase

Dear editors,

In copy editing, we have the term “vanity caps.” You see vanity caps a lot in PR materials: Maybe that new burger place serves a Bacon Cheeseburger, or that architectural firm styles its name LiKE ThIS for some reason.

Luckily, we follow our own style, which means we can lowercase the names of generic menu items and capitalize just the first letter of most company names, even the ones that style themselves in all caps (IKEA, I’m looking at you). When a company name is an acronym and you pronounce each letter individually — like CNN — all caps make sense, but otherwise, sentence case is best for our purposes. (If a PR rep reaches out to complain, tell them all caps just aren’t our publication’s style.)

Some exceptions prevail: If a dish is particular to a restaurant and has a whimsical name, for instance, like the Cronut. Any questions? Catch me in the #eater-copy-edit or #curbed-copy-edit Slack channel and I’ll help you make a call.

Besides vanity caps, some words are capitalized in error, many of which I’ve catalogued in our Curbed Word List and Eater Word List.

After keeping track of the ones that pop up most often in our stories, I compiled a list of the 15 most commonly capitalized words that should actually be lowercase:

baby boomer

bitcoin

bloody mary

census, but U.S. Census Bureau

civil rights, civil rights movement, but Civil Rights Act

heaven/hell

internet

kosher

martini

midcentury modern

millennial

president/queen/other official titles when they appear on their own (but capitalize before a person’s name: President Obama)

profession names (director, principal architect, etc.)

wagyu

wine country

Copy News

First off, I’m out of office next week, July 30 to August 3. Let me know if you have questions about that!

New to our word lists: realtor, bicycle/bike, Tudor Revival, skate park, potpie, hole in the wall, slushie, and neo-soul.

There’s a literary scammer in the news today. The latest installment of the New York Times editing quiz. Google Docs gets an AI grammar checker smart enough to recognize incorrect subordinate clauses. And these 2,000-year-old scrolls buried by the ash of Vesuvius may finally be read.

Have a great week,

Emma