Do you want to be Mayor of the City of Philadelphia? You don’t have my vote.

Now that the Philly mayor’s race is heating up, it’s time to evaluate the candidates on the only platform that matters: capitalization. No, Wharton bros, not finance capitalization — noun capitalization.

Two nouns in particular: mayor and city.

Neither is a proper noun. But that doesn’t stop many — including those who want to be it and lead it, respectively — from capitalizing both.

Neither is a proper noun.

For the record: The only time mayor should be capitalized is when it immediately precedes that person’s name, as in, Mayor Jim Kenney. The only time the standalone city should be capitalized is if it starts a sentence. “I want to be Mayor of this City,” you say? Until you lowercase both mayor and city, you ain’t ready.

“But they’re important words!” I hear you cry. Sure are. But unless you’re following the Trump Manual of Style, just because a word is “important” or worthy of emphasis is no reason to capitalize it.

This isn’t as petty as it sounds. I’m not the only one who pleads for capitalization sanity. Every reputable English style guide — Associated Press, Chicago Manual of Style, Modern Language Association, and plenty of others — will tell you that non-proper nouns shouldn’t be capitalized, no matter how important they are.

Errant capital letters are distracting to the eye and brain, which is why modern capitalization rules have evolved to limit capitalization, by and large, to proper nouns (gotta respect a name) and the start of sentences (so you can more easily identify when one idea ends and another begins). Pay no attention to the Germans, who capitalize every noun. Over-capitalization makes your writing sound juvenile and shouty at best, if not unhinged. (See again: Trump Manual of Style.)

Unfortunately, most of our mayoral candidates haven’t gotten the memo. If we can’t trust them with our words, can we trust them with the keys to City Hall? (Yes, City Hall is capitalized for the same reason Independence Hall is capitalized, so back off.)

Let’s name names.

The fact that the longest-shot candidates in the race also boast the best capitalization definitely says … something … about Philly politics. Delscia Gray doesn’t appear to capitalize mayor or city anywhere — but that’s largely because her online presence is nonexistent. No website, and a Twitter account with just a handful of tweets — most of them from 2016, when she was lobbying Donald Trump to become his secretary of state. Really.

Then there’s Warren Bloom. He’s got paragraphs in all caps and sentences in which every word is capitalized, but only one errant City, and no errant Mayors. You might have completed your test in crayon, but you got these particular questions right.

Honorable mention: Before John Wood was booted from the ballot, his website was the cleanest of the bunch. A retired police lieutenant toiling in obscurity, Wood exhibited a discipline we haven’t seen in the race. But after not surviving a challenge to remain on the ballot, Wood replaced his website with a long-winded statement that was a capitalization mess, including not just Mayor and Mayoral, but capitalized nearly every job title he’d ever held. Turns out there were any number of challenges he wasn’t up to withstanding.

Our next group keeps things pretty clean, but there’s room for improvement. Maria Quiñones Sánchez, Cherelle Parker, and Rebecca Rhynhart largely lowercase city, but on their websites and/or Twitter, they bounce back and forth between mayor and Mayor in lines like: “it will take a Mayor with the vision and the courage.” Better check that vision if you’re still capitalizing mayor.

» READ MORE: Antisemitism vs. anti-Semitism: Which is worse?

Amen Brown, Helen Gym, and David Oh — the only Republican in the race — also lowercase city, for the most part, but they’re even less consistent with mayor/Mayor. At least bad capitalization is bipartisan.

Jeff Brown, Derek Green, and Allan Domb: A mess. A mix of city and City, mayor and Mayor. No and no.

Sure, Green hails from the Northwest Coalition, but Germantown is a far cry from Germany.

By the time we reach James DeLeon, things get rough. DeLeon’s site includes lines like, “I am running for Mayor Of Philadelphia because I want to bring about positive change in the City.” He’s not content to just offer the offending Mayor and City. Et tu, Of? Oof.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and recessive accents to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.