en-GB-oxford LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM

[William Overington]

Peter Constable wrote as follows.

>William Overington wrote on 05/30/2003 12:39:11 AM:
>
>> One other small point.  Could the first letter of Oxford be a capital
>letter
>> or would that go against the format of the tagging system?
>
>Please read the RFC.

Do you know, I have no idea as to what is an RFC and I have no idea where to
find it so that I could read it.  I am on a learning curve with this as with
many other matters, so putting the words in full followed by (hereinafter
RFC) would be helpful and a web reference would be helpful.  Finding out
where to start is often difficult for someone who is trying to learn.

Could someone possibly say please?

However, the fact remains that, regardless of what people sat in committees
have decreed in one of their documents, Oxford is a city in England and the
name is spelled with a capital letter.  What does the Oxford English
Dictionary or a related publication say about whether one should use a
capital letter when the name of a city is used as an adjective?

Surely that old adage about "It's for the computer" is not going to be
trotted out as when bureaucrats oversimplify data recording and produce
erroneous records, as if just because some people somewhere designed a
_computerized_ format they are somehow allowed to behave illiterately.  Is
this part of dumbing-down culture?

Surely, the ability to write good English is important in all disciplines
where discourse takes place using the English language.

William Overington

30 May 2003