A Capital Idea

I agree that the rules of capitalization can be a bother at times, but it doesn't bother me enough to make me want to abandon the effort. I think that the Industrial Revolution should be capitalized to distinguish it from an industrial revolution, but I could be wrong about that. I also get confused about the Universe. Back in the day when there was only one universe, it didn't matter, but now, with all those other universes out there, it seems that our own Universe should be capitalized, but maybe not. I do know that you always capitalize the name of a country or nationality, even when it appears as part of another term that would not ordinarily be capitalized, like "German shepherd" or "Dutch oven". Species of plants or animals are not usually capitalized, except when they are used as titles. If there is a picture of a German shepherd with a title under or over it, the German shepherd becomes "German Shepherd" because it's the title of the picture. If you write a story about German shepherds, and you title it "The German Shepherd", then the whole thing is capitalized, including "The" because it's at the beginning. If the "the" appeared anywhere else, like "Gunther the German Shepherd", then it wouldn't be capitalized.

During the 18th Century, they used to capitalize all nouns, which must have been easier. I don't think they had always been doing that because it's not done in the King James Bible, which was written in the 16th Century. One thing they did differently in the KJV was they began a lot of sentences with "And", which would not have been tolerated when we went to school. I seem to remember reading somewhere that they did that because it was written that way in the original Hebrew language, so I guess they were trying to make it sound authentic. You think written English has funny rules? Try written Hebrew! First of all, it's backwards, you read it from right to left. I'm not sure about modern Hebrew, but in Biblical times they didn't write the vowels, just the consonants, which is why nobody to his day is sure how the Hebrews pronounced the name of God, which they spelled "YHWH".

I'm not sure why I used the leftist term "social injustice" in my last post. Maybe you are a bad influence on me. I'm sure there was social injustice in the old agrarian days, but it seems like it got worse when people started living in cities. I was thinking about how they used to hang people for stealing a loaf of bread. Maybe they had done that previously but historians don't write about it as much.

Slum neighborhoods are also usually associated with cities, but of course there are also rural slums. Maybe they're not so noticeable because they're more spread out and concealed by vegetation. That little church I visited in Georgia must have been part of a rural slum, judging by the appearance of both the building and the congregation, but I don't remember seeing any houses around there, or farm fields either. The only thing I noticed was lots of pine trees, which was about the only thing that would grow in that sandy soil. On the army base we didn't have any grass, or even weeds, just pine trees and bare sand. They used to make us rake the sand around the barracks every morning before we left for training. There was nothing to rake up, we just walked up and down dragging a rake with each hand, which made parallel straight lines in the sand. I don't know why, maybe they were frustrated because there was no grass to cut or weeds to pull.

I was only in Georgia for a couple of months, which (lucky me) happened to be July and August, and I only got to go downtown a few times. There wasn't a lot to do there, but it made a nice break from military life. I was too young to drink in the bars, but not too young to engage the services of a nice lady who came to visit me in my hotel room after I mentioned to the elevator operator that I was looking for female companionship. There was a USO facility where they held dances on Saturday night, with local girls about high school age as volunteer dance partners. That's all you could do with them was dance, though, because they had chaperones who watched us like hawks. Truth be known, being hornswoggled by those church people was certainly not the worst thing that happened to me. Like I said, it was an educational experience but, then  again, so was most everything else in those days.