Well, in German every noun is capitalized, no matter whether it is “proper” or not, so this whole discussion seems rather specific to English, at least to me. There’s also the question when a genus name becomes used as a common name, is the capitalization dropped along with the italics? Examples include drosophila and arabidopsis used as common names for Drosophila melanogaster and Arabidopsis thaliana.
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Of course it’s always so, here nothing is capitilized but names/toponyms and there’s no confusion, you can just say the genus of green frogs instead of simply green frogs, and it’s preferred as people are seeing brown frogs as green for some reason.
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Well, the convention with bird common names, at least in North America, is to capitalize – Lazuli Bunting rather than lazuli bunting. Seems to work fine for birders (who rely more on standardized common names than on scientific names anyway) so I don’t see the problem with applying that to other taxa. I certainly do it for mammals and herpetofauna, where English common names are steadily becoming more standardized.
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And sometimes it leads to disagreeing kingdoms, as when people see brown algae and identify it as Brown Algae. Phaeophyceae are kingdom Chromista; but usually, what the person observed is a brown species of Rhodophyta, which is kingdom Plantae. I constantly have to comment that you can’t go by color when identifying “brown,” “red,” and “green” algae.
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It’s a long time since my youth but assuming kids pick up a pen at all what do they write in but cursive? Even if most writing is via a keyboard how do you avoid taking short notes and writing shopping lists without pen and paper? You can’t always have a keyboard within reach.
I’m not sure what you’re asking. From what I see they write in block letters. That’s just an anecdotal observation of course
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I’m old and grey, but when I went to high school I chose to print for legibility - and still do. Left-handed so writing in ink was tiresome. I prefer pencil, if not at my keyboard.
But hand writing in italic is fun.
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I’ve been interested to see the conversations deviate, my original has been fully answered, I think, there’s only so much one can say regarding italics :)
One thing with common names, -and this isn’t directed at anyone, just my thoughts- is that as we have latin/greek names for international/ universally understandable use (with some work if one lacks experience, but still a universal system) the common names can simply be ‘what the locals call it’ or ‘what the majority call it’.
I’m not saying this well, but trying to standardize them can easily lose background and
I really like looking through common names, the amount of different names can be quite surprising, maybe especially to me as I rarely use them.
Edit: I didn’t save this when I wrote it ( just as a draft), but is still relevant, I think…
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I’m a teenager and never really learned cursive (although I think I can write my name properly in it - I’m still working on developing a signature) but my handwriting is easily legible. I believe you old folks would call it “printing”. If I’m in a hurry it will be messier, but even my rushed notes are easier to read than the handwriting of some people I know who are twice my age. I can read cursive as well, but only if it’s neat and well-formed. My aunt wrote an entire letter to me in cursive once, and I managed to decipher it without too much difficulty. Adults’ signatures on the other hand - forget it! They’re not even cursive any more, just scribbles. So I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply about kids not being able to write without learning cursive.
Then again, it could just be me. I’m a bit of a throwback - I care about proper grammar and punctuation, for example, and I always italicize scientific binomials! The handwriting of many other people my age is approximately at 6-year-old levels as far as I can tell.
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I had the same thing for my GRE. I couldn’t remember how to do many of the capital letters. I couldn’t get around having to use the word “I” and that was one of the cursive capitals I had forgotten.
Caesar salad doesn’t have balsamic vinegrette.
Dressing includes Sinapis alba , Allium sativum , Gallus gallus domesticus , Piper nigrum , Citrus x limon
But what species of anchovy did they use?
One guess is the Californian anchovy or northern anchovy (Engraulis mordax)
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This old folk has printed since I left primary school. I guess my high school teachers were happy to be able to read what I wrote.
Aren’t signatures made to be unreadable? Ao you can’t easily fake them if you don’t get what is written there?.)
It’s like that for me, looks afwul, I didn’t write anything by pen in years if I think about it.
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This discussion of printing and cursive made me smile. The recently retired curator at the Oregon State herbarium has beautiful cursive handwriting, each casual note a work of calligraphy. One of the state’s important historic collectors, though, had terrible handwriting, cursive of course. Sometimes several of us would get together to try to decipher a label, a problem not helped by a tendency to use idiosyncratic locations – Frank’s place? Really?
My own handwriting is poor. I try to print when I want people to read what I wrote, but can’t help breaking into cursive – it’s so much faster. My father’s handwriting was so persistently terrible that in law school his profs would set him up in a separate room with a typewriter to take exams.
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I can read the first section all right. It takes more effort than to read, say, my mom’s handwriting (which is as good as mine if not better) but yours is not too difficult. The second section, I’m going to guess is in the Cyrillic script since I can’t decipher it at all!
And I suppose that is the point of signatures, but they definitely evolve over time. People who don’t sign things much tend to have neater, cursive-like and actually readable signatures, but people like teachers and doctors just hastily scribble something and call it good. That’s what I’ve seen anyway.
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Yup, that’s just to show if there’s any change, much more experience in usual writing, so English tends to be simplier.
Doctors’ writing is a meme, they write something totally unreadable.
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I have personally seen teachers’ signatures though, they’re quite awful.
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You cannot write fluidly by writing capitals - plus it’s hard to read by others. Surely kids at school are taught handwriting still. Even in these days of keyboards you grab a pen and at least the back of an envelope to make a quick note.
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