The Problem With Nouns...

I've coined a term that I'm unsure will catch on: Glorified Nouns. I just did it there, see? It's the capitalisation of words which don't technically deserved to be capitalised, behaving as proper nouns without actually being so.

And it's something that has raised a bubbling rage in me.

You may think that any normal person would have far more important things to worry about, but allow me to make my case for why our very future rests on this 'harmless' issue...

Land Rover’s Rugby World Cup campaign, which tells the story of celebrity involvement in a rugby match played by ‘the world’s smallest rugby club’ (interestingly in a match against Streatham-Croydon 3rds) continually capitalises ‘rugby’ and ‘game’.

That the article was written by Johnny Wilkinson does not pass muster as an argument for this fault, as it would had to have been either approved or written, in the main part, by an editor.

This is evidently a deliberate device to emphasise the importance of those particular words, insinuating that the problem of glorifying nouns lies with the rules of grammar rather than Messrs Wilkinson and Editor’s usage. The inexplicable, guarded perimeters of the language will be assaulted and assailed by the beefy champion of British rugby because they are, quite simply, irrelevant. To be more precise, their relevance is in their observation, and that has ceased.

The phenomenon is by no means new, however its acceptance into a legitimate parlance certainly is. At first, Apple pioneered (but were not innovators of) the lower-case phenomenon, where no words, regardless of noun status or sentence placement deserved capitalisation, with one exception: the word Apple. This symptom of text language as facilitated by less-than-smart-phones, fortunately, did not gain currency in normative English. On this occasion, the marketing departments of Ogilvy and the like did not manage to concoct a pandemic linguistic triste with the bacchanal practice of poor grammar (see what I mean about living in the wrong century?).

Then came the glorified capital. Of course, it wasn’t a new concept. In the reverse of my copy of Nicholas Nickleby by Penguin Classics, flyers for the publication circa 1838 are printed exhibiting exactly the same thing. Posters for the up-and-coming performances of plays by workaday writers such as Shakespeare do it. I’m sure I saw various improper nouns being capitalised when I last flicked through the Bible.

The intention has always been the same: emphasis. But it is not just emphasis. It as an emphasis that implies such importance that it is no longer bound by the rigours of correctness (correctitude?). The examples just cited, such as the Bible, were careful about practicing moderation with respect to glorified nouns. They were limited to a few words, such as any variant on the pronoun ‘he’ and His manifestation as Lord or Saviour (and, more recently, various synonyms thereof).

This I will gladly admit to poetic license and the fact that, if you are a book that has caused as much fuss as the Bible, then you’re admitted certain liberties (likewise if you are Shakespeare or Dickens, who both deserve their deified status in my opinion). But what really Grinds My Gears is what happened, probably with the Human Potential Movement, when every Tom, Dick or Harry verb, noun, or completely inconsequential word started becoming deserving of glorified noun status.

My hypothesis is that this began in earnest with self-help books. These books usually need to emphasise a great many words, and do so rather than using conventional tools such as italic or bold but by affording them a grammatical status that they do not deserve. ‘To have Empathy, you must Listen to the Eternal Soul of all of your friends. Your Spirit Guide will be your Saviour in the Transient Confusion of daily life’ etc.

For me, this is not a problem in and of itself. The problem I have (as I believe it is evident that I wouldn’t have bothered to write any of this if I didn’t have a problem with it) is that it encourages the belief in readers who have not, perhaps, taken the greatest of care with their own grammar, that this usage of capital letters is to be encouraged.

I hadn’t worried about such an eventuality until lately. But, such as with the non-existent capitalisation of late, it has become a mainstay of normative language. Adverts by reputable companies with extremely intelligent and well-versed editors (one hopes) have begun to print adverts that glorify improper nouns left, right and centre (usually just centre). It seems that the rule of only capitalising proper nouns and the first letter of sentences is under great threat.

I am meant, however, to be somewhat liberal and say ‘Okay, fine, that is the natural progress of a naturally evolutionary language’. Yet I don’t really believe this. It is about discipline. It is about standing strong against an increasingly pervasive passivity whereby anyone can make their own rules. No. They may not. To quote Ariane Mnouchkine, “Discipline is the foundation of equality, of love”, and to quote her quoting Ghandi, "Indiscipline is a kind of violence".

I remember taking the tube to work in Stratford when I used to live in South London and gazing at the line of poster adverts. The insurance company Aviva had an advert that made regular grammatical mistakes in a short space. The horrifying thought struck me that the advert had to have been approved by a content team, most likely, whose job it is to weed out this sort of misnomer and who hadn't noticed it, or perhaps who had but ran it anyway.

The use of glorified nouns is maybe a symptom of a bigger social problem: a general lack of care regarding anything at all. Perhaps I’m cynical, or perhaps this is something that really deserves to be thought about.

After all, how we use language is an indicator of how we live; it is our means to describe the world - internal, external and imaginary - in which we live. That is the reason I try to take care with my writing, though maybe I am antiquated in my belief that others should do likewise.

All the same, if indiscipline is a form of violence, then the English language has been taking a battering for some time now. Perhaps the credo should be: if you care, take care. With jazz improvisation, you can only break the rules if you already know them inside out. But in all of the arenas I've worked professionally, there seems to be an indiscipline taking root; an attitude that supposes "I don't need to know the rules. I can just plunge right in at the deep end."

Whether it's theatre, music or just basic English, I'm worried that this problem is endemic. Access to the arts should, of course, be open to everyone; but that does not legitimise any old Joe deciding of a morning that they have nothing to learn before they have set foot in a rehearsal room or on a stage. A good start might be the most basic: the language we use.