Today's Grammar Lesson: "God" Is Capitalized.

Yeah, I saw what you did there. You think you are all sly and everything, spelling God with a lower case g. Being anti-establishment and all. Showing how you can buck cultural tradition and be so smart, letting people know that you don't buy into conventional religion and that the guys in the collars can't make you capitalize the word God if you don't want to. 

Yeah, yeah, I get it. We talk about the Hindu gods and the Greek gods and the Aztec gods. This is your way of demoting the Hebrew-Christian God to His deserved place among the rest of the myths.

Why did the chicken cross the road? Lame joke, right, because it's been told a zillion times before, and we all get the punchline. Only the guy who made up that joke about 200 years ago was funny. Everyone else who tells it is being boring at the least and a plagiarist at the worst.

So when you don't capitalize God, what you are doing is stealing somebody else's joke. You are retelling the chicken joke. And it is old, very old now. We all get it. Move on to something creative.

This trick is no better than the annoying ploy of using periods after every word to emphasize a point. You. Know. Who. You. Are. And yes, it is weak. Very. Very. Weak.

For the sake if the grammar police, let me clarify the point. God is a proper noun. Proper nouns are capitalized. This is third grade grammar, ladies and gentlemen.

Is the word president capitalized? It depends. If the word refers to a specific person, as in:

The President arrived to address Congress.

then yes. If it could refer to a number of individuals, as in:

The president has the power to veto any law.

then no, it isn't. In the first case, we capitalize because we are only talking about one president, the current one. In the second case, we could mean any president, from Washington to Obama, and all future ones, so we do not capitalize.

Same with God. If we are referring to a single, specific entity, such as, "The Muslims worship God," then God is capitalized. If we are referring to any number of entities, as in "Both modern Christians and the ancient Greeks have worshipped gods," then the answer is no.

Whether God exists or not may matter in philosophy, but not in grammar. We capitalize Santa Claus.

When you refuse to capitalize God, you tell me two things about yourself. First, that you are very unoriginal and think you can steal someone else's joke and still be funny. You call that creative. I call it plagairism.

Second, you don't know third grade grammar.

 

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