Standard reference works list 'spring' as a common noun, which does not, therefore, take a capital letter, so "I love the Spring" is wrong, but "I love the spring" is correct.
I prefer George Orwell's admonition to disregard any of the above rules if they result in poor English (not about Spring, but you get my drift).
If I write "I prefer the spring", it's not inconceivable that I like a coil of metal wire that goes boing when you push it. But if I write "I prefer the Spring", there is less ambiguity.
I think as ‘to google’ has so rapidly become a verb, it should be lower case. Capitalising it gives it unwarranted importance!
And going back to Buenchico’s points, I would rather every writer followed Orwell’s rules for writing good English (and apologies for the cut/paste):
1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
.. "I would rather every writer followed Orwell’s rules for writing good English" ..
With a statement like that, you are really leaving yourself wide open.
Someone with such high demands of others must read their original post and then agree, that it is classed as poor form to start a sentence with the word 'I' .. ?
Good english .. has gone downthe pan.
Funnily enough, I came across this conundrum yesterday when posting on another forum.
Yes, putting a capital letter on spring can avoid ambiguity in certain contexts, otherwise, using the lowercase 's' should suffice.
If I were to say: "In spring and summer...", the context is unambiguous, but saying: "Daffodils spring up in Spring" might be the way to go!
Pyxis. Agreed, although there are some here who'd rather it was 'daffodils spring up in the spring', which to my mind is still ambiguous, albeit somewhat surreal!
How is “daffodils spring up in the spring” ambiguous?!
I don’t really see that capitalisation make a blind bit of difference. And only “spring” would seem to matter in this regard anyway unless you think that a “summer” is someone who “sums” (and yet somehow a “Summer” cannot be!)
or that they were planted too close to a source of water - in which case it would be "Daffodils spring up in spring close to a spring". I won't go into the case where someone has been fly-tipping springs nearby.