Should Moon,Earth, and Sun be Capitalized?
Again and again, even on astrology blogs, I see the Moon is spelled in lower case: ‘moon!’ Look at the lyrics for a popular song:
Got no mansion, got no yacht,
Still I’m happy with what I’ve got;
I’ve got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.
(I’ve got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.) —Google
If the topic was the moons of Jupiter, of course, lower case works just fine. But if that moon happens to be Callisto or Io or Ganymede, we capitalize the proper name. But when speaking about Earth’s Moon rather than any of the millions of other moons in space, Moon should really be capitalized, too. The Moon is it’s proper name. Just like we write Copernicus, Kepler and Einstein, not copernicus, kepler and einstein.
But at some time, (possibly within the last 20 years?) our Moon lost some of it’s silver lustre when it lost its capital letter. The same criticism could be made of attempts to downgrade both the Sun and planet Earth by making them lowercase as well. When we plant seeds into the earth, we don’t capitalize. But when we speak of ‘Mother Earth’ or ‘Spaceship Earth’, of course we do. And our unique moon, flying high overhead in silver and pearl, is The Moon. Just as we wouldn’t call Einstein einstein, we shouldn’t confuse our particular Moon, with just any moon!
Maybe some of the fault lies in search engines, like Google, which don’t require ANY capitalization in order to find things! That may be an ongoing trend… but I hope not! Proper names are WORTH capitalizing!
