In New York Times (November 1) article titled “A cup of G.I Joe,” Maureen Dowd introduces the following remarks from Howard Schultz, the C.E.O. of Starbucks about Leadership. Dowd suspects if Shultz is partly motivated by a desire to run for president.
“The government does a very good job of sending people to war,”
Schultz told me in New York this past week, “and a very poor job of
bringing them home.”“I have an interest in trying to make a difference,” he said. “I don’t
know where that’s going to lead.” He believes that “the country is
longing for leadership and for truth with a capital T.”“We’ve lost our collective and individual responsibility, and our
conscience, and that has to be addressed. And that is linked to a
dysfunctional government and a lack of authentic, truthful
leadership.”http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-a-cup-of-gi-joe.html?hp&action
What does “truth with a capital T” mean? How different is it from truth with a lowercase t? Is this expression in fashion?
Best Answer
This is a good question. Yes, there is a difference between truth and Truth, between nature and Nature, between fighting for a cause and fighting for the Cause. The proper nouns are definite, a unique instance of that thing admitting no others. It personifies it.
See also the song "Ya Got Trouble" from The Music Man:
By using a capital, it seems more important. It may become an archetype. Or it may be the only one they know. Certainly I as a child did this to special places. It wasn’t just the hill, but the Hill; not just the lake but the Lake; not just the hollow, but the Hollow. There was just one of them for me, and so each of those became for me a proper noun.
Fairy stories often contain such things: the Witch, the Shoemaker, the Woodsman, the Prince, the Castle. This question about J.R.R. Tolkien’s use of capitals from the Fantasy & Science Fiction SE site touches about this. This happens much more in the more fairlytale-like The Hobbit than in the The Lord of the Rings proper, and it far rarer in The Silmarillion or his other serious works where he was more apt to give things like the Sorcerer’s Isle a name in his own invented languages.
Tom Shippey has commented on this practice as being especially noticeable in The Hobbit. It imbues the tale with an easily understood simplicity of language while giving weight to the places named: the Water, the Hill, the Last Homely House, the Mountains, the Wild, the Door, the Lonely Mountain, Lake-town and its Mountain, the King of the Dwarves, the Necromancer. And many, many more.
Used in this way, careful capitalization can create a narrative effect upon the mind of the reader that is desirable in certain contexts. Poets do this when they attribute human qualities to non-human objects or concepts.
We can see this in romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “The Sensitive Plant”. Here are a few examples from the poem:
...
Other examples of this can be found in Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, whose title is a line from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Browning uses not just the titular Dark Tower, but gives voice to Nature herself.
These stylistic choices can gently lift the narrative from that of the merely mundane to some higher plane wherein abide Plato’s abstractions, things that never fade with time but instead remain forever perfect, for the very reason that they exist only in the mind of Man alone and are therefore all the more real for that, being part of Eternity.
Yes, of course I did that on purpose. Cheap, perhaps. But don’t Man and Eternity seem to become something greater that way?
Politicians sometimes make use of the same technique, or have it attributed to them, as perhaps is being done here in the article you mention. However, their reasons for doing so are seldom so noble as those of poet or philosopher.