Adventures in AP Style – Trojan or trojan
This month has seen an increase in the number of articles written using the word “Trojan”, mostly thanks to Microsoft’s Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) being leaked as a torrent on various trackers around the world. Subsequent news suggested that some of the downloads were infected with malware, specifically a “trojan.”
Spellcheck on every product I use hates trojan with a lowercase “t”, so it’s time to see what the AP Style book says.
A Trojan, of course, is named for the Trojan Horse which appeared to be one thing (a gift) and was instead something else (a way to sneak in Trojan warriors). Not surprisingly, the AP Stylebook says that Trojan should be capitalized when referring to the Trojans as historical people, or as members of entities that use the Trojans as their mascot like USC and numerous high schools.
According to the Associated Press Stylebook, both words are capitalized in Trojan War, but not in Trojan horse. The former being the proper name of a historical event, and the latter being the unofficial or non-brand name of an object.
However, the trusty AP Style Guide is silent on the computer term for trojan which is akin to the non-capitalized, “virus.”
Webster’s only defines “Trojan horse” in the computer sense. The difficulty with this solution is that it works best in non-technical situations where the term isn’t needed to be repeated. Constantly using “Trojan horse” in a more technical article where the term is used several times will throw of the rhythm of the prose fairly quickly.
So, what is a writer to do when faced with the obstacle of needing to “use AP Style” without any guidance from the AP Stylebook?
Generally, I check to see if a respected news source like a news paper has published anything with the word or phrase I need, though in this case, the technique has proven less useful. Most examples I can find also use the phrase “Trojan horse” even when speaking about computer malware.
The second difficulty is that Google’s News Search inexplicably returns results based upon user comments to a news story. Thus, when trying to find New York Times articles with the word “Trojan,” I get numerous results in which the word is written by John Doe, who isn’t much of an AP authority.
In the end, it looks like I’ll just have to go with what seems to fit best for the article. If writing about a single incident or piece of malware, I think I’ll stick with the “Trojan horse” solution. For a technical article about trojans in general, or about viruses, trojans, and malware, I’ll just have to click Ignore-All in the ol’ Spellchecker.
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