A young woman was recently recognized for winning the American Legion and Auxiliary Oratorical Contest with her speech, entitled "To Be or Not To Be."

It's her speech, and the capitalization is hers, but I couldn't help pausing over the capitalization of the second "To." My initial response was that it should be lowercase. Then I thought it would look funky in this instance to take down that cap.

Is there a rule that supercedes the general lowercase rule for prepositions in titles, in a case such as this (a famous quote as well as a repetition)?

There are many styles for capitalization of words in a title. You have mentioned two. One I don't particularly care for, but which I see increasingly used is: To be or not to be with only the intial letter capitalized.

Digressing for a moment: In the phrase "to be", would you consider "to" to be a preposition? If it is a preposition, what noun is its object? If it isn't a preposition, what is it? I admit to being totally at sea.

Well, is the to in to be a different word than the to in to me? There's a disagreement amongst people who write about language (e.g., grammarians, linguists) as to what is the infinitival form of the English verb. Some say to be is the infinitive, and others say be. (Is in back of a preposition? Some say the phrase is, and some say it's two prepositions and a noun.)

What's the difference between:

1. Reading is good.

2. To read is good.

To my ear the gerundive, reading, sounds better, and the infinitive [(to) read sounds more stilted. Reading seems more like a noun, e.g., you can say the reading went well, but not *the to read went well.

Since "in back of" exactly fills the same functional slot as "behind", and since it can't be decomposed without destroying its "behind" meaning, I say it's a preposition -- that just happens to consist of what we, in other contexts, call independent words.

With respect to "to" in "to be": of course it's not a preposition; it's the English infinitive flag. This becomes very clear when you consider the translation of "to be or not to be" into other languages. German: "Sein oder nicht sein." (or: "Sein oder Nichtsein." -- but that then means "existence or nonexistence"). Spanish: "Ser o no ser."

Here's one that has always puzzled me: "to want to". Is "I want to be alone" parsed as "I Want" What? "to be alone" or "I want to" Do what? "be alone" (Or even "I want to be" What? "alone")

Phroglet