Sun, Earth, Moon...When Do We Capitalise?

A reader wrote in to Mind Our English (Star2, Thursday 21st July) about when to capitalise sun, moon and earth. Fadzillah Amin, MOE's language adviser answered: There are no hard and fast rules about when to capitalise the first letters of these words and when not to.

There is indeed a grammar rule which states that proper nouns are capitalised. Examples of proper nouns are Karim, Malaysia, Mumbai, Sungai Pahang, etc. So, the names of the planets, stars and constellations are spelt with capital letters: Earth,Sun, Venus, Mercury, Leo, the Milky Way, etc. However, we say the earth, the moon, and the sun unless of course when they are personified. Remember, personification? When you personify an idea or an inanimate object, it means you are investing it with human qualities. Thus, in HD Carberry's poem, Nature, the four seasons are personified: Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn.

Therefore, when we apply the rule of capitalizing proper nouns, we'll have to disagree with the example that Fadzillah Amin quoted from a NASA website: The strategic placement  permits constant observation of spacecraft as the Earth rotates on its own axis. Here, the Earth should be spelled in lower case as the earth. She's right when she said: The case of the moon is different. Earth has only one moon, and in ordinary writing, we call it the moon... So it's more common to use the moon, and we don't ever call it Moon without the before it, as we call earth without the.

Again, when she quoted NASA to justify her explanation, we should disagree with her: NASA, however, uses initial capitals for all three space objects, i.e. the Sun, the Moon and the Earth...Is it OK in scientific writing to break grammar rules? I don't think so.