You probably know to capitalize proper nouns as well: names of places, people, titles, geographic regions, months, days of the week, holidays, racial and ethnic groups, planets, historic events, and so on. And you capitalize adjectives derived from proper nouns: French toast, Swiss army knife, Irish setter (but: dachshund, golden retriever, beagle).

Proper capitalization is really nothing more than correct spelling. And since nearly all of us all have spell-checkers and dictionaries as close as our elbow, why, you might wonder, devote an entire column to something as prosaic as spelling?

Because we miss it in our writing. No matter how prominent or obscure, educated or ignorant, intelligent, well-spoken, public sector or private, no matter what skills we bring to the organization, for some reason, many working people are baffled about capitalization.

Why so much confusion over something that ought to be simple? My theory is that it's related to that proper-noun business.

Have you ever met a proper noun that didn't signify something important? Look at the list above: all pretty significant stuff. One reason we know that, even absent the words' meanings, is that they start with capital letters. So wouldn't it follow that if something were important, it should be capitalized? We have a perfect example right here in our agency: Customs inspectors, the sine qua non of the frontline. It makes perfect sense to capitalize Customs inspectors when you write about them, doesn't it?

Well, no, not according to the dictionary or the rules that govern English. The pope, the president, inspectors, rabbis, imams, an office director, even a commissioner - common nouns, one and all. Yet nothing on that list is common, exactly; all those words denote something or someone pretty weighty. Still, they're common nouns unless and until they're transformed into Pope John Paul II, President Bush, a Muslim cleric, Commissioner Bonner, and so on. In other words, when you're talking grammar, common doesn't necessarily mean common. It simply means lower case.

If you're talking about Customs Inspector John Jones, then by all means he gets a capital letter. But once his title ceases to precede his name ' John Jones is a Customs inspector who works at the port of Buffalo (port, did you notice that?) - then it's just another noun in the sentence. You should capitalize Doctor Phil Magillicutty, but if you're writing "who knew? Phil became a doctor?" it's an entirely different matter.

Even so, a whole column?

Unless words are your cash crop (as they are for those of us on the masthead of this publication), you'd be amazed - dumbfounded, in fact - at how many of us, including JDs, MBAs, and Ph.Ds, write things that look like this: Just because We Think something is Important - a Position, A program, An event - doesn't Mean We can Capitalize It. The Birth of Our First Child is a Pretty capital Event, too, But not According to the rules of English.

I hope those sentences look as silly to you as they do to me. Yet an awful lot of otherwise very professional manuscripts look like that. And what then begins to happen is that the reader starts to think, well, if the author doesn't even know about the proper use of caps, what other mistakes has he or she made? Consider this graphic example: By now, most of us have read somewhere, or had shoved in our hands, promotional screeds that are vanity-published by hate groups, start-up religious cults, or similar fringe groups. Never mind the so-called production values of these things, which are the true pulp fiction of our day, but if you read any of the manuscript itself, you no doubt found outrageous statements claimed as fact and written in rotten grammar, bad English. With capital letters all over the page To Emphasize Things. I don't know about you, but for me, the bad grammar, bad diction, and bad spelling always served to reinforce the stupidity of the group's claims. It's that old business that if you read one wrong "fact," you wonder about the rest of them. And if You Have Caps all Over The page, you Wonder If the Author didn't drop Out Of school in The Fourth Grade.

Lastly, a few words about capitalizing in the final frontier:

According to my favorite scholar on these matters, Dr. Charles Darling of Capital Community College in Hartford, Conn., the final word has yet to be written about capitalizing words in cyberspace, especially those associated with the Internet. Darling writes, "Most dictionaries are capitalizing Internet ... and associated words such as World Wide Web (usually shortened to Web), Web page, Web site, etc., but ... some corporations, such as Microsoft, seem to be leaning away from such capitalization."

The bulk of written material seems to favor Darling's position, as does this writer. Dr. Darling has much of value to say about capitalization and other aspects of style and composition, and he says them with great humor.

But the best place to learn whether a word should be in upper or lower case? That dictionary or spell-checker that's as close as your elbow.