When to Capitalize the Word “Earth”
From grammar to astronomy to cosmology and back.
“The Earth”, says American writer and poet Wendell Berry in his Unsettling of America, “is what we all have in common.”
I write about the environment a lot. That includes mentioning here and there the largest environment other than space — Earth. In these articles, poems, and napkin scratch, I find myself capitalizing the world “earth” almost at random. In one stroke, I use a big “E” and in the next, it is a small little “e.”
So, which is it? Is there a convention to follow? As it turns out, there are grammatical rules to follow which I will share soon. Other than that though, what about in terms of what it means to capitalize this word? What are the implications? As I have walked around in my head about the subject, I have come up with some ideas. I find that language use is just a reflection of our shared cosmologies of Earth being a middle ground, a meeting place — or that special rock that we step down onto and look up into the sky.
The boring (important) grammar stuff
First off, as an American, I am terribly uneducated about languages other than English. Because of this, I will only be speaking about English and the language’s grammar rules. If anyone has thoughts about…
