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Capitals for prefixes and nicknames
prominence, but puts the line out of balance. A much better method is to put honorary titles, when there are many, in small type in a separate line below the name, and to spell out all the words.
A title not clearly intended as the synonym of a specified person should not begin with a capital.
- He was taken before a judge.
- Every captain on the staff obtained his brevet.
- The assembly chamber was soon filled with senators and congressmen, mayors and sheriffs, and other magnates.
- There is no appeal from the High Court of Chancery. Wards may weep, gay captains fume, serjeants-at-law protest, but a chancery judge is an oracle with a bench for a tripod, whose decisions oft are bare of sense as the inarticulate mutterings of a Delphic pythia.
PREFIXES AND NICKNAMES
Prepositional words ushering foreign proper names usually begin with a capital, as De or D' in French; Da, Delia, De, or Di in Italian; Van in Dutch, or Von in German;[1] but there are prefixes that do not begin with a capital, and when the author sys
- ↑ For French and German select the capital when the name is not in full, as De Tocqueville; but when preceded by a title or by the baptismal name, the prefix should be lower-case, as in de Tocqueville. Van Beethoven with capital V is correct when alone, but the capital V should not appear in Ludwig van Beethoven. In Italian there is more irregularity: Edmondo de Ami M. cis is correct, but so are Leonardo da Vinci and Luca della Bobbia.
