Capital Letters & odd spells; Dr S Johnson quote

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

>> pynchon capitalises dominant nouns.
>> which reminds me of German definite articles)... the rules are not the same
>> in English, pynchon must have some leeway in deciding what the dominant
>> nouns are.


---to which I would add that a return to a certain freedom 
to spell and punctuate, each writing person to their own 
way of thinking, is a movement away from the standardisation
of the later 19th and 20th centuries---probably something Pynchon
 might have political-linguistic sympathies with. Earlier, of course, 
printers tended to usurp  the author's right to decide for themselves
which spelling or punctuation  variation to use. This makes researching 
the history of variorum in manuscripts and editions, say pre-1850, 
a pretty darn complicated task. (Hey, not that modern manuscripts
are any simple thing...)

On a related lexicographical  note---
On my summer reading list is a book by Jonathon Green called
Chasing the Sun:
Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made.

He begins with a famous quote from Dr Johnson's Preface,
a vital quote near-silently resonating throughout 
Mason Dixon in a variety of ways, from which I extract:

"When I first engaged in this work, I resolved to
leave neither words nor things unexamined, and
pleased myself with a prospect of the hours I 
should revel away in feasts of literature...which I 
should enter and ransack...the triumph with which
I should display my acquisitions...But these were the
dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer...
that thus to pursue perfection was, like the first inhabitants
of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which when they had reached
the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same
distance from him."

 I bet someone will write a piece of M&D crit called
"to chace the sun." But thankfully not this week. 

YRS,
Eric Alan Weinstein
Centre For English Studies
University Of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk