Talk:Getting a Ticket

Title

@Alien333: I strongly disagree that Getting A Ticket should be considered the proper name. Just because it appeared on the title screen doesn't mean it's proper English. It definitely isn't. English titling conventions have required for a long time that words like "a" be lowercased in titles. Writers sometimes broke these rules for film intertitles, or in lower-budget books, because they just didn't know about or care so much about the rules, paired with a general lack of supervision. In other words, for some movies, there was a general laziness to the film intertitling, and because there was little supervision (since there was usually only one guy doing the intertitles), they just said "Yup, good enough!" People were only supposed to see the movie once, usually in a lifetime, so the details didn't matter as much as you might think. It wasn't that the "A" in the title was correct; it was that it was guessed ad-hoc for the moment and never corrected. It could also be a psychological element—like, capitalizing every letter makes the title more noticeable, for example, which can make sure people see and remember it. This is why when you read instruction manuals or online help pages, you'll often see the technical writers capitalize important words, like: "When you get your Public Ticket, then you go to the Member Page," where neither "Public Ticket" or "Member Page" are really supposed to be in caps, because this is not proper English. But if people see the phrases in caps, they remember the phrases, because it wasn't done to be proper English, it was done so the words stand out and can be easily referenced. So I would consider the way the title looks more a stylistic choice at best, and mild ignorance at worst. If you do a search on a search engine, the titling convention I'm talking about is more or less proven, because nearly everything that ever references the film uses what I'd call the proper title, Getting a Ticket. SnowyCinema (talk) 11:47, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

You said some stuff I don't agree with:

• If it's a stylistic choice, we tend to keep those, because of the whole "as published" idea. (and also this convention wasn't too strictly followed, see e.g. a, b, c, d.)
• If it's mild ignorance, we also keep these. It's the same as for typos: we use {{SIC}} sometimes, but we don't just correct the author's ignorance. e.g. Mortuary Afairs (now deleted as abandoned, but no objections were made to its title). It was spelled, including on the title page, with one f.

It's mostly the last argument, namely its being a crushing majority of the time referenced with a lowercase a (including on imdb), that I find convincing.

Therefore, I'm moving it back to lowercase a. — Alien  3
3 3 16:48, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Hmmm... The presentation of the title in the transcription should be accurate to the transcription if possible, but I have a bias towards wanting title casing conventions to be followed in the actual titles of the pages. If it's something like from vs. From, not such a big deal for me (even though by modern standards it's incorrect). Though I personally always follow title casing rules in the titles of my transcriptions, if somebody else left it as "from", I wouldn't change it. The argument against lowercase from isn't compelling enough. But if its a capitalized letter A, huge red flag. A capital "A" is just blatantly ungrammatical, and it even was back then—and it's a situation that turns from "using the source caps, where most readers would assume it was correct anyway" to "making Wikisource look bad, because it's incorrect and readers would notice".

In terms of "Afairs" with one "f", if it's constantly referred to as "Affairs" in other sources, even contemporary ones (and even perhaps within the book itself), I think the MediaWiki title should be changed in that case, to align with the fact that it was obviously a typographical error; an erroneous title not actually meant by the author to be reproduced in mention. SnowyCinema (talk) 18:01, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Once more unto the breach: this seems to me to be a misuse of {{SIC}}, the doc of which clearly says: This template should only be used for words that are actually typos. It is not for indicating a different or obsolete spelling. — Alien  3
3 3 19:13, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Well, it is grammatically incorrect (and it would have also been in 1929), so are we going off whether or not it was intentional? Like I said, the "A" was quite possibly intentional, but not necessarily. SnowyCinema (talk) 19:46, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

As I see it, adding {{SIC}} is assuming that it wasn't intentional, which we can't do in this case. It's not like when you come across "moonrse" in a book, that is a correct use of SIC because it is obviously unintentional. — Alien  3
3 3 07:35, 9 February 2025 (UTC)