The Universe of Discourse

"Boolean" or "boolean"?
In a recent article I wrote:

... a logical negation function ... takes a boolean argument and returns a boolean result.

I looked at the the Big Dictionary, and all the citations were capitalized. But the most recent one was from 1964, so that was not much help.

Then I tried Google search for "boolean capitalized". The first hit was a helpful article by Eric Lippert. M. Lippert starts by pointing out that "Boolean" means "pertaining to George Boole", and so should be capitalized. That much I knew already.

But then he pointed out a countervailing consideration:

English writers do not usually capitalize the eponyms "shrapnel" (Henry Shrapnel, 1761-1842), "diesel" (Rudolf Diesel, 1858-1913), "saxophone" (Adolphe Sax, 1814-1894), "baud" (Emile Baudot, 1845-1903), "ampere" (Andre Ampere, 1775-1836), "chauvinist" (Nicolas Chauvin, 1790-?), "nicotine" (Jean Nicot, 1530-1600) or "teddy bear" (Theodore Roosevelt, 1858-1916).

Lippert concluded that the tendency is to capitalize an eponym when it is an adjective, but not when it is a noun. (Except when it isn't that way; consider "diesel engine". English is what it is.)

I went back to my example to see if that was why I resisted capitalizing "Boolean":

... takes a boolean argument and returns a boolean result.

Something seemed wrong. I tried changing the example:

... takes an integer argument and returns an integer result.

I would have been happy to have written "takes a boolean and returns a boolean", and I think that's the controlling criterion.

Sorry, George.

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