Capitalize "Founding Fathers"?

[emil...@gmail.com]

Hello everybody, I was wondering when referring the the founders of the US, do we capitalize "Founding Fathers". What about "founders"? Should that be capitalized too?

Thanks. :)

[Don Phillipson]

<emil...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:87129519-2153-40d2...@googlegroups.com...

Most Americans probably capitalize Founding Fathers but
not founders: but these are points of writing/printing style
rather than grammar or semantics, i.e. conventional.
General guidelines for capitalization can be found in The Chicago
Style Book and similar references.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 3:03:35 AM UTC-5, emil...@gmail.com wrote:

> Hello everybody, I was wondering when referring the the founders of the US, do we capitalize "Founding Fathers". What about "founders"? Should that be capitalized too?
>
> Thanks. :)

Usually we write "the Founders," once it's been established that we're talking
about the Founding Fathers (the phrase doesn't have to be explicitly used).
These days, to some extent it's to play down the fact that no women were involved.

A number of recent books use the single word in their title or subtitle.

[Tony Cooper]

On Sun, 24 Jan 2016 00:03:33 -0800 (PST), emil...@gmail.com wrote:

>Hello everybody, I was wondering when referring the the founders of the US, do we capitalize "Founding Fathers". What about "founders"? Should that be capitalized too?
>
>Thanks. :)

The word "president" is capitalized when it refers to a specific
president: "The President gave a speech today".

"Founding Fathers" and "founders" are treated the same. People who
refer to our Founding Fathers are referring to a specific group of
individuals. The individuals that are considered to be the founders
of our nation are not that specifically identified as a group.

While all lists of the names of our Founding Fathers may not be
exactly the same, custom dictates that we consider the group to be
specific.



--
Tony Cooper - Orlando, Florida

[Stan Brown]

On Sun, 24 Jan 2016 08:21:23 -0500, Don Phillipson wrote:
> Most Americans probably capitalize Founding Fathers but
> not founders: but these are points of writing/printing style
> rather than grammar or semantics, i.e. conventional.
> General guidelines for capitalization can be found in The Chicago
> Style Book and similar references.

If "founders" refers to the 18th-century gentlemen who led the US to
independence and framed its government -- in other words, if it is a
substitute for (capitalized) Founding Fathers -- then it should be
capitalized, in American writing anyway.

"Founders" would not be capitalized when it refers to, say, the
founders of anything else, such as a club, a museum, or a company.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
"The difference between the /almost right/ word and the
/right/ word is ... the difference between the lightning-bug
and the lightning." --Mark Twain

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 10:22:44 AM UTC-5, Tony Cooper wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Jan 2016 00:03:33 -0800 (PST), emil...@gmail.com wrote:

> >Hello everybody, I was wondering when referring the the founders of the US, do we capitalize "Founding Fathers". What about "founders"? Should that be capitalized too?
>

> The word "president" is capitalized when it refers to a specific
> president: "The President gave a speech today".
>
> "Founding Fathers" and "founders" are treated the same. People who
> refer to our Founding Fathers are referring to a specific group of
> individuals. The individuals that are considered to be the founders
> of our nation are not that specifically identified as a group.

They are, and they are known as the Founders, which is equivalent to Founding
Fathers.

[Katy Jennison]

On 24/01/2016 13:55, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> On Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 3:03:35 AM UTC-5, emil...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> Hello everybody, I was wondering when referring the the founders of the US, do we capitalize "Founding Fathers". What about "founders"? Should that be capitalized too?
>>
>> Thanks. :)
>
> Usually we write "the Founders," once it's been established that we're talking
> about the Founding Fathers (the phrase doesn't have to be explicitly used).
> These days, to some extent it's to play down the fact that no women were involved.

No women were credited, perhaps; but the US would have fizzled out
pretty quickly if no women had been involved at all.

--
Katy Jennison

[Dr. Jai Maharaj]

In alt.usage.english, in article
<87129519-2153-40d2...@googlegroups.com>,
emil...@gmail.com posted:

Excerpt:

Capitalization Tips

By Christi Mcguire
AP Style Archives

As I was working on a manusript this weekend, I had look
up a few words to see whether or not they should be
capitalized. I discovered that "Founding Fathers" is
always capitalized. . . .

End of excerpt from:

http://www.christimcguire.com/category/ap-style/

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

http://bit.do/jaimaharaj

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 2:10:43 PM UTC-5, Katy Jennison wrote:
> On 24/01/2016 13:55, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > On Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 3:03:35 AM UTC-5, emil...@gmail.com wrote:

> >> Hello everybody, I was wondering when referring the the founders of the US, do we capitalize "Founding Fathers". What about "founders"? Should that be capitalized too?

> > Usually we write "the Founders," once it's been established that we're talking
> > about the Founding Fathers (the phrase doesn't have to be explicitly used).
> > These days, to some extent it's to play down the fact that no women were involved.
>
> No women were credited, perhaps; but the US would have fizzled out
> pretty quickly if no women had been involved at all.

No women were involved in writing the Declaration, the Constitution, or the
Bill of Rights. Abigail Adams famously wrote to her husband (from Boston) to
"remember the Ladies," but he seems not to have paid her advice any attention.
It was almost 150 years until they could vote, and they're still not guaranteed
equal treatment under Federal law.

[Tony Cooper]

Expand the arc of your swung cat. "The Founders" is a reference to a
specific group. The word "founders" is often a reference to a larger,
non-specific, group.

Check Wiki at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United_States
where it is written:

"A few of the 1787 delegates were wealthy, but many of the country's
top wealth-holders were Loyalists who went to Britain. Most of the
others had financial resources that ranged from good to excellent, but
there are other founders who were less than wealthy. On the whole they
were less wealthy than the Loyalists,"

That's an example of the non-capitalized (and proper) version that I
brought up.

Or, the New York Times at
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html?_r=0

"When they proclaim that the United States is a “Christian nation,”
they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks
a certain box in a survey or census but to the country’s roots and the
intent of the founders."

and

"You can’t appreciate the founding of our country without realizing
that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our
history, that could kill a society. That’s why to me this is a huge
thing.”

There are several other examples of the non-capped "founders" in that
article.

[charles]

In article <n837jg$5rc$1...@news.albasani.net>, Katy Jennison

To paraphrase "The Importance,,,"

--
from KT24 in Surrey, England

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 3:03:48 PM UTC-5, Tony Cooper wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Jan 2016 11:08:02 -0800 (PST), "Peter T. Daniels"
> <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> >On Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 10:22:44 AM UTC-5, Tony Cooper wrote:
> >> On Sun, 24 Jan 2016 00:03:33 -0800 (PST), emil...@gmail.com wrote:

> >> >Hello everybody, I was wondering when referring the the founders of the US, do we capitalize "Founding Fathers". What about "founders"? Should that be capitalized too?
> >> The word "president" is capitalized when it refers to a specific
> >> president: "The President gave a speech today".
> >> "Founding Fathers" and "founders" are treated the same. People who
> >> refer to our Founding Fathers are referring to a specific group of
> >> individuals. The individuals that are considered to be the founders
> >> of our nation are not that specifically identified as a group.
> >They are, and they are known as the Founders, which is equivalent to Founding
> >Fathers.
>
> Expand the arc of your swung cat. "The Founders" is a reference to a
> specific group. The word "founders" is often a reference to a larger,
> non-specific, group.

But we are talking about the specific group.

Do try, just once in a while, reading for comprehension instead of just
something to start a fight over.

> Check Wiki at
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United_States
> where it is written:
>
> "A few of the 1787 delegates were wealthy, but many of the country's
> top wealth-holders were Loyalists who went to Britain. Most of the
> others had financial resources that ranged from good to excellent, but
> there are other founders who were less than wealthy. On the whole they
> were less wealthy than the Loyalists,"
>
> That's an example of the non-capitalized (and proper) version that I
> brought up.

Non-capitalized and improper, if the reference is to the Delegates to the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. By your
"reasoning," the capitalization of <Loyalists> is improper.

> Or, the New York Times at
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html?_r=0
>
> "When they proclaim that the United States is a "Christian nation,"
> they are not referring to the percentage of the population that ticks
> a certain box in a survey or census but to the country's roots and the
> intent of the founders."
>
> and
>
> "You can't appreciate the founding of our country without realizing
> that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our
> history, that could kill a society. That's why to me this is a huge
> thing."
>
> There are several other examples of the non-capped "founders" in that
> article.

The New York Times is very often at odds with normal American usage. They
sometimes make a change decades after everyone else has made the change.

[Adam Funk]

Why not, they capitalized all sorts of things for the fun of it!


--
Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the
attempt to avoid physical exertion. ... Bicycle riders would have us
throw all this on the ash heap of history. --- P.J. O'Rourke

[Don Phillipson]

"Stan Brown" <the_sta...@fastmail.fm> wrote in message
news:MPG.310ebaf32...@news.individual.net...

> If "founders" refers to the 18th-century gentlemen who led the US to
> independence and framed its government -- in other words, if it is a
> substitute for (capitalized) Founding Fathers -- then it should be
> capitalized, in American writing anyway.

Challenged on Kantian grounds, because this decision could
not be made into a universal rule. We may say a person is
a Senator or Congressman (caps) but when we call him a
legislator we are not obliged to capitalize that simply because
his formal title is capitalized. Similarly the 1776 Founding
Fathers enjoy a unique position in American history as
the founders (lower case) of the federation.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Monday, January 25, 2016 at 5:15:07 AM UTC-5, Adam Funk wrote:
> On 2016-01-24, emil...@gmail.com wrote:

> > Hello everybody, I was wondering when referring the the founders of
> > the US, do we capitalize "Founding Fathers". What about "founders"?
> > Should that be capitalized too?
>
> Why not, they capitalized all sorts of things for the fun of it!

Nu, when did the two expressions come into use?

[aliman...@chaminade.edu]

To say that no women were involved is to miss what it means to be a human being. Too often we reduce the human reality of significant situations down to a small subset of people who did something like sign an historical document. As if some of the women did not, literally, keep those men sane and guide them, helping them become the people that they became.

Aliman

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2017-12-26 00:40:25 +0000, aliman...@chaminade.edu said:

[ Rearranged to get posts in the right order: who was saying the other
day that we don't often get top posters (me, perhaps?)? ]

>
> On Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 3:55:14 AM UTC-10, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>> On Sunday, January 24, 2016 at 3:03:35 AM UTC-5, emil...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> Hello everybody, I was wondering when referring the the founders of the
>>> US, do we capitalize "Founding Fathers". What about "founders"? Should
>>> that be capitalized too?
>>>
>>> Thanks. :)
>>
>> Usually we write "the Founders," once it's been established that we're
>> talking> about the Founding Fathers (the phrase doesn't have to be
>> explicitly used).> These days, to some extent it's to play down the
>> fact that no women were involved.>> A number of recent books use the
>> single word in their title or subtitle.

> To say that no women were involved is to miss what it means to be a
> human being. Too often we reduce the human reality of significant
> situations down to a small subset of people who did something like sign
> an historical document. As if some of the women did not, literally,
> keep those men sane and guide them, helping them become the people that
> they became.
>
> Aliman

Hardly worth waiting two years to get this obvious contribution.


--
athel

[Peter T. Daniels]

Hardly worth wasting the energy to (a) bitch about a contributor who has never
been here before using what may be the standard where she is accustomed to
posting -- viz., top-posting -- and (b) contribute nothing to the discussion
of the role of women in the formation of the United States. Aliman might have
become a valued contributor, but instead she is nitpicked away.

How many women were in Parliament in 1776?

[yanb...@gmail.com]

Incidentally (and remarkably), the term "the Founding Fathers" was first used in a 1916 speech by Warren G. Harding (later, a U.S. president), a man not generally acknowledged to be a master of the English language.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Friday, December 29, 2017 at 8:14:36 PM UTC-5, yanb...@gmail.com wrote:

> Incidentally (and remarkably), the term "the Founding Fathers" was first used in a 1916 speech by Warren G. Harding (later, a U.S. president), a man not generally acknowledged to be a master of the English language.

That's incorrect. Harding may have been a corrupt s.o.b., one of the three
worst presidents (the other one being Buchanan), but he was very good at
orating. See Allan Metcalf, *Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush* (Houghton Mifflin, 2004).

From his web site:

"Presidential orators, communicators, blunderers, coiners of words; presidential
accents; presidents depicted in movies and television; how to talk like a
president. And then, for good measure, a short chapter on each president.
How should you talk if you’re president of the United States—or if you want to
be? That is the question that motivated this book. What do Americans want from
their president? Soaring oratory or plain speaking? Dignified or down-to-earth speech?"

("Bloviate" wasn't an insult.)

[yanb...@gmail.com]

Harding's oratory ability is very definitely a matter of hugely divergent
opinions. Here is what H.L. Mencken, himself a rather able manipulator of
our language, said of Harding's speaking style.

“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me
of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the
line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs
barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort
of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of
pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble
and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

[yanb...@gmail.com]

And another thing: Harding was in no way an s.o.b., neither was he
corrupt (the scandals all came out after he was dead). He was just
a good ol’ boy who rose to power by circumstance (and his wife’s
prodding), and who tried to do what was expected of him - beloved
of a wide circle of good-ol’-boy friends who turned out to be
crooks who took advantage of his position. Alice Roosevelt Longworth
(ex-president Teddy’s daughter) put it this way: “He wasn’t a
bad man – he was just a slob.”

[David Kleinecke]

On Friday, December 29, 2017 at 8:17:51 PM UTC-8, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> Harding may have been a corrupt s.o.b., one of the three

> worst presidents (the other one being Buchanan), ...

I have observed in recent months that both Franklin Pierce
and Andrew Johnson, hitherto not in the running, now have
supporters for the title of second worst President ever.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Friday, December 29, 2017 at 11:31:20 PM UTC-5, yanb...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, December 29, 2017 at 11:17:51 PM UTC-5, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > On Friday, December 29, 2017 at 8:14:36 PM UTC-5, yanb...@gmail.com wrote:

> > > Incidentally (and remarkably), the term "the Founding Fathers" was first used in a 1916 speech by Warren G. Harding (later, a U.S. president), a man not generally acknowledged to be a master of the English language.
> > That's incorrect. Harding may have been a corrupt s.o.b., one of the three
> > worst presidents (the other one being Buchanan), but he was very good at
> > orating. See Allan Metcalf, *Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush* (Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
> > From his web site:
> > "Presidential orators, communicators, blunderers, coiners of words; presidential
> > accents; presidents depicted in movies and television; how to talk like a
> > president. And then, for good measure, a short chapter on each president.
> > How should you talk if you’re president of the United States—or if you want to
> > be? That is the question that motivated this book. What do Americans want from
> > their president? Soaring oratory or plain speaking? Dignified or down-to-earth speech?"
> > ("Bloviate" wasn't an insult.)
>
> Harding's oratory ability is very definitely a matter of hugely divergent
> opinions. Here is what H.L. Mencken, himself a rather able manipulator of
> our language,

How often did he speak in public?

> said of Harding's speaking style.
>
> “He writes

What does that have to do with speaking style?

[Peter T. Daniels]

The Prologue to the biography of Buchanan, *Worst. President. Ever.," assesses
the competition for the title and makes the case that neither Pierce nor Johnson
nor GWB qualified.

I can't offer details because I gave it away when I finished it -- literally, on the subway to my cousins' house, and my cousin expressed an interest.

[yanb...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, December 30, 2017 at 9:46:57 AM UTC-5, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
...

> On Friday, December 29, 2017 at 11:31:20 PM UTC-5, yanb...@gmail.com wrote:\...

> >
> > “He writes
>
> What does that have to do with speaking style?

...

He spoke what he wrote. I have a phonograph record of him delivering one of his famous, timeless speeches. He was pretty awful.