how about this one

On another thread on LT - Anglicans are Pious Agnostics!

I suppose a rhetorical pedant would call that an oxymoron, but then some other pedant would come along and say we shouldn't use made-up words like oxymoron that have no basis in classical Greek...

...as to the unnesessary upper-case, that seems to be one of those Modern Evils With Which we Just Have to Live.

Yes, I routinely get into debates with staff over their desire to capitalize a noun simply because it's important to their subject. They will write things like "Upon completion of the Daily Report, the Project Manager will report any irregularities to the Program Manager." When I tell them that it's just a 'daily report', and they are just 'project managers' and 'program managers', they look at me like puppy dogs who want to please but don't know what I'm talking about. I always end up saying something like "Yes! I am pointing to the door, but it's not The Door just because it's the specific door I want to you to use!"

Am I out of line here?

If we refused to use words formed from Greek roots but not used by classical Greeks I suspect we could possibly chuck quite a lot of words out of the dictionary. Personally I don't have a problem with it.

>3 Osbaldistone:
I think it's the confusion between identifying things by describing them and identifying them by using their title. If you have a specific report which is titled "Daily Report", that has to be acted on by the person whose job title is "Project Manager" then that sentence is perfectly reasonable. If there's a report that is produced daily but is titled "Project Status Report", and it's acted on by the Finance Director who is managing the project, then the terms in your sentence shouldn't be capitalized.

>2 thorold: I have to confess I put the unnecessary caps. in post no.1 to emphasise the point. It was the contradiction of terms which amused me.

>6 justmum: Oh no how disappointing. Was the exclamation point yours as well? because the caps + punctuation so made it look something seen on a quietly bigoted bumper sticker. One with an orange background, no doubt.

>3 Osbaldistone: Sorry but speaking of bigotry, those Germans on your staff are probably doing their very best to write in English. On the remote chance that they're native English speakers I think you missed a chance by not using inverted commas/quotation marks to emphasise a word: The Project Manager will report "any" irregularities. Better still: The Project Manager's are reporting "any" irregularities!

All this made me go back to retrieve a sentence I read a few weeks ago in A.N. Wilson's A life of John Milton:
It needs an act of supreme historical imagination to be able to recapture an atmosphere in which Anglican bishops might be taken seriously; still more, one in which they might be thought threatening.

(Wilson obviously forgot about Desmond Tutu when he was writing this in 1982.)

Back when I was a freelance copy writer, I had a client who was Swiss German. I would write and post pages on his commercial website and he would go in and capitalize all the nouns. I told him over and over that it wasn't a matter of preference and that in the U.S. those caps looked like typos and therefore made his website look sloppy. It took him a long time to finally take the point. I do not miss client work.

>9 rocketjk: It's when you start to look at that kind of difference that you realise how fleeting and local our conventions about the use of things like punctuation and capital letters are. You get used to rules like nouns being capitalised in German and proper-noun adjectives not being capitalised in French, or "title-case" being used for headings in American newspapers, "sentence-case" in British ones, and then you look at a book printed a couple of hundred years ago and you realise it was all different then, even in English. And if you go back to the Greeks and Romans, of course they exclusively used what we call upper-case for inscriptions and what we call lower-case for handwriting.

(And of course your Swiss friend would have been mocked in Germany for not knowing when to use an "ß")