Talk:Roll On down the Highway

Requested move 26 June 2017

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Moved per Darkday:

– The page was moved with the argumentation: Revert, to match all other Wikipedia articles with this phraseology. MOS:CT states that particles in phrasal verbs are capitalized in titles. There are a few pages with "Roll on", "Come on", "Carry on", etc. not capitalized, but most are. With the preposition "down" you are right, the rule is ignored, all "Down"s are capitalized, just as with the preposition "like". androl (talk) 14:17, 26 June 2017 (UTC) --Relisting. — JFG ^talk 13:54, 17 July 2017 (UTC) --Relisting. DrStrauss talk 17:15, 6 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. It's too bad that those four requests are grouped together, because I support only three of them. In all four cases, it's correct to capitalize on, because it is not used as a preposition here. See also Come On Eileen. Therefore I support the moves to Come On Over for Dinner, Come On, Cowboys and Come On Down to My Boat.

However, in Roll On down the Highway, down is a preposition with less than five letters, so it must be lowercased according to MOS:CT. You cannot simply ignore rules of MOS:CT you don't like, and it's not true that this rule is generally ignored. See e.g. The Englishman Who Went up a Hill but Came down a Mountain. So I oppose Roll On Down the Highway.

(By the way, in Come On Over for Dinner and Come On Down to My Boat, Over resp. Down are used as adverbs, so capitalizing them here is correct.) Darkday (talk) 22:59, 26 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Unless there is a strong push to change all the others as well, it should be left as it is because changing titles disrupts the view count mechanism and accomplishes little. Besides, lower case on two-word prepositions in titles is standard English form. - JGabbard (talk) 03:35, 27 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Move as indicated by Darkday. The caps rules of MOS:CT are exactly as they said. Namely:
I think "on" is an adverb in "roll on", meaning "in continuation"... "roll on" isn't a phrasal verb here any more than "talk on" would be. John V John (talk) 17:21, 29 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
"Down" should not be lower case in the first song. Note that it is proposed to be upper case in the last song. All words of four letters or more should be capitalized, even if they are prepositions. If without is capitalized in titles then with so should be too. - JGabbard (talk) 03:11, 6 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

What you are proposing contradicts the Wikipedia Manual of Style (MOS:CT), which says that four letter prepositions should be lowercased. Darkday (talk) 17:16, 6 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Comment You are correct, Darkday The WP Manual of Style does say that, and yes I do propose to contravene it because it is wrong since it conflicts with standard English usage. The appearance of the title as it now stands looks goofy and is unacceptable, for three reasons: First, lower casing should be limited to small words, i.e., two and three-letter prepositions only. Four-letter words, whether prepositions or not, do not fit this description. Second, to capitalize a small preposition while lower casing one twice its length is inconsistent. Third, if 'down' is to be lowercased then so is 'with', and therefore, to be consistent, 'without' would also have to be lowercased. Certainly 'without' should not be considered a small or unimportant word, and putting these longer words into lower case results in an improper and hackneyed appearance. - JGabbard (talk) 12:26, 15 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

JGabbard, your argument that "with" and "without" should be handled consistently can be carried forward: If "down" is capitalized, then "up" should be capitalized also, to be consistent, and if the preposition "up" is capitalized, then other two-letter prepositions like "in" or "on" should be capitalized as well.

The rule to lowercase prepositions with four letters and less is admittedly arbitrary, but the rule to only lowercase prepositions with three letters and less would be just as arbitrary. No matter what rules you prescribed, there would always be people who disagree. But in any case, if you don't agree with the current Wikipedia capitalization rules, then the best place to address this is the MOS talk page. Darkday (talk) 21:58, 16 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

FALSE INFO probable here! Needs correction

BTO wasn't contracted by Ford to do a commercial! It was an imaginary assignment Bachman made for himself.

If you follow the interview in the article ("ROLL ON DOWN THE HIGHWAY by BACHMAN-TURNER OVERDRIVE". songfacts.com. Retrieved 2016-11-23.)

Songfacts falsely reports the following: "This song evolved out of something they wrote for a Ford commercial. In our interview with Randy Bachman...

It links to the interview and if you look it says:

"Well, of course, I'd never had a publisher, I never knew how to get them the song. But I would craft the song that I would think would be good enough, if I ever met them..."

... "but I had the dream of them doing my song. And I did the song."

"It's like getting an assignment: write a new commercial for Ford and you'll get paid $100,000. Well, I'd sit down and I'd write a commercial for Ford, "let it roll down the highway." Ford never picks it up and I have a song called "Roll On Down the Highway." I've written a song because someone's asked and then inspired and got me to do it. So it's an assignment, and it's a deadline. It's, Can I do this? Of course I can do this! And it's pushing yourself to do stuff even with fake deadlines and writing fake songs for artists who are never going to do your song. It's a motivational kind of thing for me." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entrynotfound (talk • contribs) 04:58, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]