Talk:1960 U-2 incident/Archives/2020/December

MOS:JOBTITLES

@User:Dicklyon: With the perfunctory acknowledgement that you are likely to know better than I about such matters, my edits were based on having been "corrected" in the past for capitalizing under such circumstances. Certainly "President Dwight D. Eisenhower" would be capitalized. I have been told, however, that "U.S. President Barack Obama" should have been "U.S. president Barack Obama", as it was analogous to "the president of the United States, Barack Obama". While I wasn't entirely convinced, I couldn't really refute it either, and it was based on this that I changed the bit about President Eisenhower in this article. As for "Chair", I must admit to being nonplussed; this one seemed to me to be a more-or-less straightforward case. I don't see how it would be capitalized, except in the form of direct address (e.g. "Good morning, Chairman Cannon". "House Appropriations Committee Chair Clarence Cannon" (i.e. "Clarence Cannon was the Chair of the House Appropriations Committee") strikes me as quite awkward. As is my customary practice, I will request the input of the learned and perspicacious Tony, another editor who knows this subject far better than I. Joefromrandb (talk) 05:27, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Joe, you'll find the P capped wherever the institutions themselves are using job titles. I don't feel too strongly about capping P when it directly precedes the name of the incumbent; but my preference is to downcase. Same with "chair", I guess. Tony (talk) 08:34, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

I had actually done a web search on "House Appropriations Committee Chair Clarence Cannon" and found it almost always capped thus; I wouldn't say it's awkward. In the case of President Obama, I can see that maybe putting the "U.S." in front of it makes for generic "president", but again, I don't see any support for that in sources. Dicklyon (talk) 20:21, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Well I was using the example of President Obama because I felt it paralleled the situation here. This article had "U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower", and I assumed that, as above, the "U.S." rendered "president" a common noun. If, as you say, sources support capitalizing it (and I've no reason to doubt you), perhaps this discussion should be moved to the MoS talk page; JOBTITLES, along with all things MoS, should be changed or clarified to bring us in line with external authority. Joefromrandb (talk) 07:42, 15 December 2020 (UTC)