What's up with the President becoming the "president"? I had this sneaky feeling that something had changed since second grade, when they wheeled a TV into my classroom and had to let it warm up for 30 minutes so I could see Carter's inauguration. I was told then if it's the President of the United States, it was capitalized. Gotcha. Capitalized. It was of those things that stuck with me from school along with kiss chase and getting paddled in the office regularly.
Out of habit, I've been capitalizing "president" in that context since then. Today it struck me that nobody is anymore. A few Google searches later, I saw where the style for many news organizations is to only capitalize a political title if it's Speaker of the House. Okay, that seems kind of random.
Fortunately, there's an entire book on this topic; see "President of the United States" or "president of the United States"?: An Historical Analysis of the Evolution of the Presidency (or presidency). The authors are Richard J. Hardy, Ph.D., Department of Political Science, Western Illinois University and David J. Webber, Ph.D., Department of Political Science, University of Missouri-Columbia, so the focus of the paper is on the political reasons for the change. It's almost as good as the angry debate I had with other tech writers at the 1997 STC conference in Anaheim regarding if there should be one or two spaces after a period (one space naturally–you're not using a Selectric anymore).
Anyway read the whole thing. It's fascinating. From the Abstract:
The data clearly reveal that before the Nixon Administration, the vast majority of publications employed the uppercase referent to the "President." However, beginning with the Nixon Administration and accelerating in the late-1970s, this near universal standard changed dramatically. Moreover, our study suggests that, contrary to popular belief, it was neither journalists, grammarians, publishers nor politicians, but prominent presidential scholars (viz., Thomas E. Cronin and George E. Reedy) who led the nation's intellectual charge to make the lowercase "president" the rule rather than the exception. We believe this grammatical relegation represents, to a large extent, both a desire by leading political scientists to make the office appear less "imperial " and a significant symbolic reaction to presidential transgressions concerning the Viet Nam War and, most importantly, the Watergate Scandal. These alterations, we contend, thus redound more from the desire by prominent political scientists to "de-imperialize" or "de-glamorize" the office than any concerted effort to establish "grammatical correctness."
Popularity: 40% [?]
Unrest by Parkway Drive
You're looking at this the wrong way. The new rule is based on context, and it all hinges on the modifier. Just look at the model set forth by the media: they don't simply refer to him as the President: "Barack Obama, the first black president, hit yet another milestone when he became the first African-American President to skip breakfast AND snack." At least they are consistent with their capitalization, which is something we emphasize in tech writing.
[Reply]
Right. Consistency. But what about the idea of the "de-glamorized" office as put forth above paper discusses? Do qualifiers make the office important again? Do qualifiers get dropped because they are too damn long to keep typing? If so, does it get to be "President" by itself? These are important questions, dammit.
[Reply]
I suppose this means I can stop capitalizing Principal?
Proper nouns be dammed!
[Reply]