The newspaper business loves style. No, not style like “fashion.” Style, like everything agreeing with everything else.
For instance, we don’t use Postal Service abbreviations for states. It’s Fla. to us, not FL.
We spell out one through nine and digitalize 10 and up, though a hundred is a hundred and thousand is a thousand. Titles are capitalized one way and not the other: you’re President Denise Wallace, but you’re Denise Wallace, president.
The subject today is capital letters. Specifically, RE/MAX or Re/Max? SEDA or Seda?
It’s in our best interest that this newspaper be readable. If not, you won’t read it. When something is written all caps, it seems to clutter the story.
There are exceptions. It’s REALTOR® in this newspaper because it’s a registered trademark of the National Association of REALTORS®. Lots of papers don’t all cap it and we might not either, if we weren’t a real estate newspaper. (In fact, we wrote “Realtor” when we started this paper, but George Linville griped so much that we started doing it to shut him up. Too bad he doesn’t gripe at his own association’s magazine; they don’t all cap it.)
Acronyms are okay. If we write about stock car racing, we use NASCAR. But the PGA Tour wants to be written as PGA TOUR. Of course, there’s no basis for this other than to try and get the name to stand out, and you’ll find the all-caps version only on their press releases and web site.
Now, RE/MAX or Re/Max, SEDA or Seda?
The real estate company is a problem, because the name probably should be RE/Max.
“The name comes from Real Estate Maximums,” said Bill Echols, a staffer at the Colorado headquarters. “That was the idea, that agents would get 100 percent commissions. The name evolved into sort of an acronym.”
Well, it isn’t exactly an acronym, which is a word made up of first letters of a phrase. Like, National Association of Stock Car Automobile Racing. RE is okay (Real Estate) but MAX doesn’t qualify, because it’s MAXimums. No fair using the first three letters.
Now, let’s go to SEDA. A spokesman at the local office said, “It’s SEDA, all capital letters. It’s the name of our company.”
That falls, then, into the PGA TOUR vs. PGA Tour league. Plus, they list themselves as “Seda” in the phone book.
So, we’re adjusting some styles and we ask your tolerance, particularly from our friends at Re/Max and Seda.
A footnote to back our case: one of the great novels was “The Day Christ Died” by Jim Bishop. In the preface, he stated that he would not capitalize the pronouns which referred to Jesus or God (“He,” “Him”, etc.) because it was distracting to the reader. No sacrilege intended, Bishop pleaded. It just makes it easier to read.