@roger,
roger wrote:
That brings up an old question that I've never gotten a solid answer to. Should more or less generic words that derive from proper names always be capitalized, even though they are what I would call generic? The word Diesel comes to mind though there are many others.
Thanks in advance.
I don't know if there is a "rule" about Diesel, Zeppelin etc, but as for units of measure, in English, French and Spanish that I know of, the units are deemed to be common (not proper) nouns. Before 1948, the writing of metric quantities was haphazard. In 1948, the ninth Comité International des Poids et Mesures approved the first formal recommendation for the writing of symbols in the metric system when the basis of the rules as they are now known was laid down. Names of units follow the grammatical rules associated with common nouns (e.g., newton, hertz, pascal), even when the symbol for the unit begins with a capital letter. This also applies to "degrees Celsius", since "degree" is the unit. In German, however, the names of units, as with all German nouns, start with capital letters. I don't know about other languages.