Sorry, Chicago Manual of Style: I’m Not Going to Stop Capitalizing the Word “Earth”

If you are crazy enough to write a novel and lucky enough to get it published, you will, at the copy-editing stage, receive what’s called a Style Sheet. Among other things, it will list all the proper nouns that appear in your book, all the characters, yes, but also the places, organizations and federal agencies. It will flag any neologisms or unusual terminology. It will summarize the story, chapter by chapter, like a too-ardent Wikipedia entry, destined to be flagged for excessive detail.

But the most destabilizing part of the document will be the section titled “General Usage and Pronunciation.” Here, your copy editor will lay bare all your grammatical quirks: Your preferences for serial commas, for example, or for writing newspaper headlines in all upper-case. Every writerly tic and tell you have will now be, starkly and somewhat judgmentally, delineated.

Oh God, I thought, reading my own. I guess I do put “a comma after ‘and then’ at the start of a sentence when a dramatic pause seems intended.” This was marked as an “author preference.” Was it? I hadn’t realized I’d added those commas until they pointed them out. I certainly had no conscious intent when doing so. It felt like seeing a photo of myself from an unflattering angle: Is that really what my chin looks like when I smile?

However, there was one preference of mine that was entirely intentional, a grammatical choice central, actually, to why I wrote Voyagers in the first place:

Earth as a planet capitalized, my style sheet read. Earthling capitalized, earthly not capitalized when not referring specifically to the planet.

The same is true, I think, for Earth and earth; that one big letter makes all the difference.

My novel is about aliens, both real and imagined. It moves back and forth between the ufology scene of the 1990s and early 2000s and the present day, where the world seems to be on the verge of first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. But I wrote about visitors from space because I loved the Earth and aliens, ironically, seemed like the easiest lens through which to filter this love. I wanted to show how wondrous our planet might seem to someone encountering it fresh, in the vastness of space. To write about the Earth like that meant showing it some respect, even if the form of my respect was not grammatically acceptable.

“In ordinary prose,” The Chicago Manual of Style suggests, referencing our home planet, “lowercase is almost always appropriate.” The only exception to this rule, CMS notes, comes when referring to the Earth in relation to other celestial bodies. (“Mars, Earth, Venus” versus “Where on earth did you find that?”) I understand that there are some uses for the lowercase, when referring to colors, perhaps, or dirt. But outside of that find this distinction ridiculous. Isn’t a planet, by definition, always a proper noun? Even when we are using it idiomatically? I looked for support elsewhere and recalled that, even if the CMS did not agree with me, Eve Babitz did, at least in spirit:

“I believe that places should be capitalized,” she writes in the introduction to Eve’s Hollywood. “North, South, East, and West are all places as far as I’m concerned […] West, especially, is a serious place that should ALWAYS be capitalized. It also sounds more adventurous to go West than to go west.”

Isn’t it just? Eve Babitz cared about the West and she cared about how things looked on the page and capitalized her work accordingly. The same is true, I think, for Earth and earth; that one big letter makes all the difference. It reminds us, at a sentence level, that we are inhabitants of a proper noun, a capital-P Planet. Embarrassingly enough, I read Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings solely because of the title, then was shocked when the novel’s translator, Ginny Tapley Takemori, told me, via email, that it wasn’t a universally beloved choice: Apparently, an editor, who had not read the manuscript, said calling the novel Earthlings would “destroy it.” But Takemori was “convinced” that it was the right choice.

“The title in Japanese is 地球星人, 地球 being Earth,” she wrote. “星人 inhabitant of a planet. The usual word for the inhabitants of Earth is 地球人, so the addition of 星人 brings an additional nuance of people on Earth viewed objectively from the perspective of extraterrestrials, which exactly describes Natsuki, Tomoya and Yuu’s vision of the Alien eye.”

I am not naïve enough to think that a change in style guides will entirely transform our relationship with the Earth.

In Earthlings, there are no aliens, at least not in the traditional sense. It follows two cousins who, as children, believe they might be aliens, and hope one day to return to their home planet. In adulthood, far from outgrowing it, their “Alien eye” grows more powerful, creating a forcefield of shocking strength between themselves and societal norms. I loved Earthlings; I felt seen by the Alien eye. It made me think of Darko Suvin and his line about estrangement in fiction, how it allows the reader to “see all normal happenings in a dubious light.” Murata’s novel does just that. It shifts the reader to a strange, new vantage point, beginning with the title: humanity as viewed from space, by an extraterrestrial other.

And yet the oddity of the term Earthlings as a mechanism of cognitive estrangement is that, actually, nothing could be less odd. Our status as Earthlings is foundational and fundamental, the truest thing we know. We all grew out of this planet. Most of us will never leave it. “Like or not,” Carl Sagan said, in his “Pale Blue Dot” speech, “the Earth is where we make our stand.” This is our reality, what if we wrote like it? What might shift if we had to accept, on a sentence level, the capital-lettered singularity of our planet? If our grammar told us Earth was special, would more people start to believe it?

I am not naïve enough to think that a change in style guides will entirely transform our relationship with the Earth. Pre-pandemic, I used to cover environmental stories as a journalist. I remember coming home from one particularly gutting shoot, where I’d filmed with people suffering in the cancer cluster surrounding a coal ash pond in North Carolina. I cried in a noodle shop describing their belief that my story would make a difference; I did not think it would help nearly as much as they hoped. I had stopped believing, at that point in my career, that the barrier between problem and solution lay only in the public’s awareness.

In the face of this, my quibbles with the Chicago Manual of Style might (do?) seem small. Who cares if you call it “Earth” over “earth”, a planet, by any other name, is still on fire. Maybe it’s because I’m a novelist and this is the nail to my proverbial hammer, but I do think what we call ourselves and our home world carries moral power. “‘We are earthbound, we are terrestrials amid terrestrials,’ does not lead to the same politics as saying ‘We are humans in nature,’” Bruno Latour writes. “The two are not made of the same cloth, or rather of the same mud.”

The Earth is, like Babitz’s West, a serious place; I like to honor it as such and remember, when I write, the mud that I am made of. When I think of it like that, even Earthlings feels like too distancing a term. We are not really inhabitants of our planet, but extensions of it. Less tenants than the house itself. We cannot pick up sticks and move. Not comfortably, not yet. If we do leave, we will live in weak approximations of the place we left behind. I imagine we will miss it terribly. In the meantime, I plan to make my stand on Earth, as Earth, starting with a rebellion against standard English usage. It’s a small thing, I know. But, in the grand scheme, so are we.

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Voyagers by Meg Charlton is available from Harper.