Capitalization, Titles
Q. Related to the headings and subheadings of a work, should the c in “o’clock” be capitalized in headline style? Is the proper title “The Origins of Our Three O’clock Prayer” or “The Origins of Our Three O’Clock Prayer”? I think it should appear with a small c. Help!
A. Your question highlights just how very arbitrary any set of recommendations for “headline style” capitalization can be. O’clock is a contraction, so you might treat it like one word, capitalizing only the first o. But it works okay too as o’Clock, because it reads more like a phrase than a single word, and the first o stands for “of the,” words that wouldn’t be capitalized in the middle of a headline. Finally, O’Clock tends to look right—a brief survey of titles of news programs and book covers suggests O’Clock is in the majority, and, though the contraction isn’t Irish, it certainly looks right in an English-language world full of O’Caseys and O’Neills. Arbitrary situations, however, call out for definite rules: we recommend O’clock, treating the contraction as what it is—a single word.
