The name of the newspaper is The Straits Times.
I notice most people write “I read the Straits Times every day”.
Should it be “The Straits Times” instead?
Thanks!
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Three is no need for quotation marks since proper names are capitalized in English.
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If you are asking if the word “The” should be capitalized, the answer is yes because that’s the official name of the paper.
The Beatles - upper case T because “The” is part of their name
the Rolling Stones - lower case T because “the” is not part of their name
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I think the group calling themselves Rolling Stones also need the definite article with a capital ‘T because it is part of their title. After all both ‘Beatles’ aka ‘beetles’ and ‘rolling stones’ do have original meanings before they were adopted by those groups.
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The rule I learned was to italicize the names of major works such as books, movies and newspapers, using quotation marks for articles and such. The newspaper would be The Straits Times.
This rule is often ignored.
A quick survey of The Washington Post shows that they put book and movie titles in quotes, while the names The New York Times and The Washington Post are simply capitalized, including “The”.
Wikipedia italicizes these titles, including “The”
As for The New York Times, they refer to themselves in initial caps, including “The”, as does The Straits Times.
To answer @Kohyoongliat’s question, formally they should probably use The Straits Times. Informally, I would guess people often don’t capitalize The.
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I learned the same thing, but how many people had the ability to write or type Italic? Publishers had a wide variety of fonts, but normal people didn’t. Even in the early days of word processors it was not easy to use Italics. Quotes were basically the poor man’s substitute since most people had no choice.
As for the Rolling Stones, I was trying to think of an example where the word “the” is not capitalized. I’ve seen several sources that imply the name of the band is “Rolling Stones”, so the article is just an ordinary article, not part of a proper noun. I have five Stones CDs and two of them don’t use the article at all on the jacket. Their web site also has the lower case article. Many of their album titles use the article. It’s upper case, but that’s because it’s an album title.
I tried to think about a lot of band names. There seems to be a strong collocation. When the article is not part of the actual band name, I couldn’t see any rhyme or reason why the article is used with some bands and not others.
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