EtA vs ETA

I should preface this post with a disclaimer: I’m a bit of a grammar nerd. I used to teach English and majored in English at college – a background that has clearly contributed to my fixation with language and explains the genesis of this post.

For a while now, I’ve been seeing two versions of the acronym for entrepreneurship through acquisition: ETA and EtA. And frankly, the discrepancy has been bothering me. Most people, myself included, typically capitalize the E, the T, and the A, while some choose to use a lowercase t as in EtA – bizarre-looking, in my view.

In school, I was taught that prepositions in titles were to be lowercase unless they were longer than 4 or 5 letters. Through in “Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition” for example, is a hefty 7 letters long. Until recently, I believed that Through should indisputably be capitalized, and that ETA should be the only version of the acronym permitted to exist.

To support my adamance, I decided to take a look at how the universities do it. Kellogg’s page agreed with me, as did those of the ETA Club at Harvard and MIT. A self-congratulatory pat on the back seemed to be in order, until I came across several where through took on a lowercase t as in “Entrepreneurship through Acquisition.” In these cases, however, the acronym was still fully capitalized between brackets. Still others went for the bold (but questionable) choice: EtA. Suffice to say, the disagreement was driving me nuts.

I would later feign an open mind, as I scoured grammar websites admittedly looking for some rock-solid evidence that my grammar school teacher and I were right. And almost all of them came through, to my delight. They reinforced the almost universal rule that my own teacher had imparted: if the preposition in a title had 4 or 5 letters and more, it was to be capitalized.

The English teacher in me rejoiced.

And then I found a disagreement, and something of a debate, on Grammarly. While the AP style demonstrated clear, strong support for the rule I’d grown up with, the Chicago Manual of Style sang a different tune: all prepositions in titles should be lowercase regardless of their length.

According to the Chicago Manual of Style, the title of Norman Maclean’s famous book would then be A River Runs through It – which just strikes me as strange – rather than A River Runs Through It. But as far as I know, the Chicago Manual of Style is just about as legitimate and trustworthy as AP style, and I bashfully conclude that there is no ironclad conclusion to this debate.

In light of this revelation however, I will work on convincing myself to be less perturbed by what I used to see as a gross grammatical error and simply recognise it as a difference of opinion. Agree to disagree, I suppose.

P.S. If I have made any grammatical errors in this post, please message me privately and tell no one.