Midterm Punctuation? Trump's "Country" Causes Controversy
This from Emily Wang at Glamour:
If you've taken a look at Donald Trump's Twitter account lately, you may have noticed an interesting style choice. The president, for reasons best known to himself, has apparently taken to sometimes capitalizing the word "country" when tweeting about the U.S. of A. (See this tweet from Friday, in which he claims that "Congressman Andy Biggs is doing a great job for Arizona and our Country!")
Well, someone must have called him out on it because on Friday morning, shortly after penning the Biggs tweet, Trump published a tweet confirming his departure from established grammar rules.
"When referring to the USA, I will always capitalize the word Country!" he wrote. (He has yet to explain his reasoning behind this.)
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1053285828892463109
Naturally, social media had a field day with this, earning Trump's self-imposed grammar rule a Twitter moment of its own. Some replies take issue with his claim that he "always" capitalizes "country." Screenshots of tweets—some sent as recently as Thursday—showed quite the opposite. Others were quick to point out that capitalizing the word country, except at the beginning of a sentence or when it's used as a proper noun, is grammatically incorrect.
But of course, as usual, the literal dictionary had the last word. "You run the country," tweeted Dictionary.com. "We still get to say how people capitalize it."
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1053285828892463109
https://twitter.com/AmazingDouglass/status/1053330783635677184
https://twitter.com/tylerbutler95/status/1053304056054276096
https://twitter.com/Dictionarycom/status/1053319276755476480