Thursday, October 06, 2005

More on Texas Hold 'em

I received a response from Norm Goldstein on Texas Hold 'em:
First, the full term, Texas Hold 'em, is the more common usage, including that of the World Series of Poker.

Also, the last word is a corruption of "them" and would be lowercase in any use (as in "sic 'em").
I'm not sure I agree that 'em would be lowercase in any use. What about in a title? What about at the beginning of a sentence?

That argument makes sense to me if the words are forced together, as in Hold'em. But not when 'em stands alone.

3 Comments:

At 5:05 PM, October 06, 2005, Blogger Bill said...

I didn't have strong feelings one way or the other, but the Post chiefs just decided to lowercase words truncated thusly in upstyle headlines. The feeling was that the cap for 'em goes only with the T.

 
At 11:42 AM, October 08, 2005, Blogger Nicole said...

OK, I'm back in civilization now and will jump into this conversation late.

I can't make much sense of that new Post rule, Bill. But it certainly works along the same lines as this style rule. Adopt one, and I suppose you can justifiably adopt the other.

But I still don't like it. Capping serves a function to set the word apart. It goes with the first letter. And in Them, that's the T. But in 'Em, that's the E.

 
At 12:10 PM, January 14, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm a little late to the blog, but on an interesting note, when you google "em" lowercase with quotes, you get alot more than "em" in uppercase. I guess either the populus is lazy or perhaps it's just that they are used to it that way? Some of the others like texas holdem should probably technically be lowercase since it's included in the word, but then again, is holdem even a word?

 

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