Since it's going to be a short holiday week anyway, I though today was a good day to wallow in grammatical pedantry. Because I have a nit to pick with America's media editors. So fair warning to all -- today's column is about nothing more than me being linguistically annoying.

Elon Musk, Donald Trump's "first buddy" (as he calls himself), is going to team up with Vivek Ramaswamy to set up a group to slash government spending. The moniker Musk picked for this group is a misnomer, since it won't actually be a federal "department" of anything, but Musk reverse-engineered the name to boost his favored cryptocurrency anyway, coming up with the "Department Of Government Efficiency," or "DOGE."

That's the way I have been capitalizing it, at any rate. Because I apparently have different standards than everyone else in the editorial world.

My own personal style guide demands that every letter in an acronym be capitalized, unless there is a good reason not to. The rest of the editorial world seems to agree. But when you write out the full name, the reverse rule applies as well -- every letter that makes it into the acronym should also be capitalized. Hence "Department Of Government Efficiency," and not (as most everyone else seems to be using) "Department of Government Efficiency."

[Hey, I warned you I was picking nits today!]

This is in keeping with my general rule for titles, where I capitalize every word, even the small ones. Most other editors only capitalize the bigger words, leaving words such as "of," "and," or "or" uncapitalized. That's their choice, when writing headlines for articles and whatnot, but it's a whole lot easier (and more consistent) to just capitalize everything, I find.

But acronyms have their own rules. With exceptions, to be sure, but this particular instance doesn't seem to merit one.

There is even a more-nitpicky rule about capitalization of acronyms, which is that if the word is not capitalized in the title then it should remain lowercase in the acronym as well. Which is why you see the Department of Defense usually shortened to "D.o.D.," and not "D.O.D." So applying this rule would give us "DoGE" for Musk's new project. But I have yet to see any media editor use this version, at least so far.

In some acronyms, whole words are left out. We don't refer to the "F.B.O.I." even though there's an "of" in the title. The title is spelled out consistent with the acronym: Federal Bureau of Investigation. Words omitted from the acronym are not capitalized.

But if the word is included, it really should be capitalized in the title as well. If you use "POTUS," then you should also spell it out as "President Of The United States." Using lowercase for the "of" and "the" would mean the acronym should properly be "PUS," but that obviously would be a little problematic. Or if you balk at capitalizing small words in titles, then the acronym should reflect this as well ("PotUS").

It gets a bit trickier when extra letters are added in to make the acronym pronounceable. A missile system was in the news recently (in reference to Ukraine) that uses an acronym which was obviously created just to sound cool. The Army Tactical Missile System would have been "A.T.M.S.," which is unpronounceable as a word and must be spelled out. But adding in a few letters from the second word results in "ATACMS," which is pronounced as the plural of "attack 'em!" To be perfectly consistent, the full name should really be spelled out "Army TACtical Missile System," but nobody does that.

When a new acronym appears, the capitalization is rather fluid, and can settle down later into just being a word. Hence most editors went from "COVID-19" to "Covid" to (much later) just "covid." I refused to follow this evolution, however, and still capitalize the whole thing, although I don't always add the "-19" anymore. And I don't think I've ever bothered (except maybe when it first appeared) spelling it out as "COronoa VIrus Disease" (as consistency would demand).

In the grand scheme of things, this is not that big a deal, I fully admit. Musk's little project is designed to be temporary, after all. Once he gets done, it will dissolve, and we'll only refer to DOGE in the past tense (if at all). But I'm sure I'll have plenty to say about it when it gets up and running, since Musk and Ramaswamy seem to be itching to take a meat-axe approach to cutting spending.

So until it is a thing of the past, it grates on me (in a fingernails-on-the-chalkboard kind of way) to see it spelled out in a news article as "Department of Government Efficiency" and then replaced by an all-caps acronym. My only hope is that it becomes so well-known to the general public that editors won't even bother to spell the full name out at all -- they'll just use "DOGE" everywhere.

I supposed I should feel lucky, since I am my own editor. This means I don't have to have a huge pedantic fight with anybody and can apply my own stylistic rules at will. So no matter what others decide is correct, I will continue to call Musk's brainchild the "Department Of Government Efficiency" -- and I will continue to cringe at others who follow a different style guide.

[Taking my Grammar Cop hat off now... regular political columns will resume tomorrow, never fear....]

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant