When writing English correctly, which is correct in which context, what are the rules please?

For example, swiss chard, swiss roll, swiss cheeses, or is it a Swiss city, a Swiss train, a Swiss newspaper?

..capital S...why the confusion all of the sudden?

Use a capital initial when usage favours it, and when connection with the proper name is still felt to be alive: "Many Swiss cheeses are known throughout the world", "the Swiss army takes Sunday off", "ignoring our advice, he married a Swiss woman."

Use a lower-case initial when connection with the proper name is remote or conventional: "We made a swiss roll, which was nice", "the salad consisted mainly of swiss chard".

R. Burchfield, the New Fowler's Modern English Usage.

Surely a swiss roll is actually an English creation and therefore it shouldn`t benefit from a capital S as it doesn`t actually exist in Swiss or should that be Switzerland Im all confuscified

I would disagree. Regardless, whether the meaning of the word has any connection to Switzerland. Swiss is still the adjective of Switzerland and therefore, it is capitalized.

Neither, it's Switzerland

British English though. Innit.


(Like you, I'd capitalize Swiss roll, Swiss chard, all of them. The only one I wouldn't capitalize is "dotted swiss", a kind of cotton fabric.)

And then there is my (linguistic) favorite, the Swiss steak made in the USA. It's unknown in Switzerland, and since some encyclopedias seem to have realized that, they now say the term comes from "swissing the meat" by rolling or pounding it. However, I've yet to find a dictionary that mentions a verb "to swiss v./t." Currently, there are just five Google hits for "to swiss a steak" (quotation marks included), and I suspect they all got their wisdom from Wikipedia.

I'll gladly change my mind if someone out there knows somebody who swisses their meat.

I'd rather not say, if it's all the same to you

Sounds bloody painful I must say

Swissing: The calendering of bleached cotton by passing it between pairs of rollers after damping.

(OED)

That process was to soften the cotton so I suppose the same could be said for 'swissing' a steak.

we have these in Mexico:




That's right sports fans... swiss enchiladas

I see you took the bait. That's why I added the "".

The answers are not all black & white...

http://www.englishforums.com/English...dvqrz/post.htm

Question:
The AP and New York Times style books do not capitalize "brussels" in sprouts, but what about Swiss chard? With careful chefs deleting spinach as an ingredient from their menus, this question is, well, cropping up. Capitalizing the Swiss in chard feels right to me, but I wonder what the strict grammarians say.

Answer:
If you look the vegetables up in the ONE LOOK DICTIONARY SEARCH http://www.onelook.com/ you'll see that almost all dictionaries capitalize Swiss chard, while about half of them capitalize Brussels sprout. Both are obviously proper names and deserving of a capital S and B, respectively. I suggest that the reason for the anomaly may be that the sprout entered the language about 300 years before the chard-- time enough for it to become a common noun among the hoi polloi. If there is a more definitive solution to the conundrum, I am unaware of it.

General (11 matching dictionaries)
Swiss Roll, Swiss roll (metamaterial): Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia [home, info]
Swiss roll: Vocabulary.com [home, info]
Swiss roll: Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary [home, info]
Swiss roll: Rhymezone [home, info]

swiss roll: Compact Oxford English Dictionary [home, info]
swiss roll: Dictionary.com [home, info]
swiss roll: Free Dictionary [home, info]
swiss roll: Mnemonic Dictionary [home, info]
swiss roll: LookWAYup Translating Dictionary/Thesaurus [home, info]
swiss roll: Dictionary/thesaurus [home, info]

General (20 matching dictionaries)
Swiss Chard: Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia [home, info]
Swiss chard: American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language [home, info]
Swiss chard: Rhymezone [home, info]
Swiss chard: Vocabulary.com [home, info]
Swiss chard: LookWAYup Translating Dictionary/Thesaurus [home, info]
Swiss chard: Dictionary/thesaurus [home, info]
Swiss chard: Macmillan Dictionary [home, info]
Swiss chard: Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, 11th Edition [home, info]
Swiss chard: Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary [home, info]
Swiss chard: InfoVisual Visual Dictionary [home, info]
Swiss chard: Wiktionary [home, info]
Swiss chard: The Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus [home, info]
Swiss chard: Infoplease Dictionary [home, info]

swiss chard: Dictionary.com [home, info]
swiss chard: Free Dictionary [home, info]
swiss chard: Mnemonic Dictionary [home, info]
swiss chard: WordNet 1.7 Vocabulary Helper [home, info]
swiss chard: Compact Oxford English Dictionary [home, info]

General (15 matching dictionaries)
Brussels Sprouts: Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia [home, info]
Brussels sprouts: American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language [home, info]
Brussels sprouts: Dictionary/thesaurus [home, info]
Brussels sprouts: Wordnik [home, info]
Brussels sprouts: Wiktionary [home, info]
Brussels sprouts: The Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus [home, info]
Brussels sprouts, brussels sprouts: Dictionary.com [home, info]
Brussels sprouts: Ultra Lingua English Dictionary [home, info]
Brussels sprouts: Urban Dictionary [home, info]
Brussels sprouts: Medical dictionary [home, info]

brussels sprouts: Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary [home, info]
brussels sprouts: Rhymezone [home, info]
brussels sprouts: Free Dictionary [home, info]
brussels sprouts: Mnemonic Dictionary [home, info]
brussels sprouts: WordNet 1.7 Vocabulary Helper [home, info]
brussels sprouts: LookWAYup Translating Dictionary/Thesaurus [home, info]
brussels sprouts: Vocabulary.com [home, info]
brussels sprouts: Linda's Culinary Dictionary [home, info]
brussels sprouts: Encyclopedia [home, info]

Enuff

As a rule of thumb to check whether the "Swiss" connection is "remote" enough to take a small s under Fowler's rule, try prefixing it with another nationality.

Does it make sense to have British swiss roll? Yes, so small s.
Does it make sense to have French swiss chard? Yes, so small s.
Does it make sense to have a Mongolian Swiss city? No, so capital S.

This test tells you whether the word Swiss acts as a true adjective, or just as the first word of a compound noun.

Of course, it you have to take the case of compound adjectives separately - Locarno could be described as an Italian Swiss city (or Italian-Swiss, or probably best of all, Swiss-Italian).

I doubt the vast majority of English speakers notice or care though, as it very rarely makes any difference to the meaning of the sentence either way.

And I thought it was me who carried the torch for linguistic nerds.

Interesting. Why wouldn't you capitalize Swiss dot? It's the only one of those three that actually has real connection to Switzerland.

DB, you should be ashamed -

made a Swiss roll, not very nice is it