Orange Hoodie

People, people, people….

So I’m putting together an instruction, as requested by the one of my sort-of supervisors. It’s an easy thing, a pleasant task. I’m using info from several other documents for part of it, and he went through and added comments to a couple of them. Fine and dandy.

Except at one spot. He wants me to capitalize “Program Manager”. As in, “… items that the Program Manager would want….” No. Just no. As justification for his desire, he refers me to “Tongue & Quill”.

a. I don’t care what you’re referring me to, “program manager” is not a proper noun. It is wrong to capitalize it. I will not comply.

b. I was unfamiliar with “Tongue & Quill”, so I hit yonder intarwebs. Ah, it’s an Air Force style guide, and my brief perusal leaves me with the impression that it’s a nice style guide. Cool. Except, wait… this is the Navy! An entirely different branch of the military! There are all kinds of things that have clued me in to the fact that this is the Navy: We work at the Navy Yard, there’s Navy insignia all over, the military personnel are in Navy uniforms, pictures hanging on the walls are of Navy ships and submarines. Hmmm… I’m sensing a theme…. Now don’t get me wrong, the Air Force is cool. They have flying things. Really cool flying things! I LOVE flying things! But that still doesn’t mean we use their style guide.

c. Actually, their style guide doesn’t say that anyway! HA! Their style guide actually says it should be lowercase! I looked it up so I could point and laugh at the Air Force, but it turns out that their style guide went the grammatically correct route on capitalization. You, dear sort-of supervisor, clearly misunderstood something.

d. Let us turn to the Navy style guide, lame as it is compared to the Air Force style guide. Yep, even our style guide says it should be lowercase.

e. Yes, I know pretty much every military document you see has things like that capitalized. They’re wrong. It’s a horrible habit. I am doing my part to rid the Navy of that absurd practice one document at a time. And because the program manager lets me, I’m not going to stop.