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Capital Letters Are Magic: Difference between revisions
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''Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to."''|'''The Electric Monk''', ''[[Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency]]''}}
One of the hardest parts of making a fantasy or science fiction world can be names. Not just for people, but for metaphysical concepts, alien races or awe-inspiring devices/weapons. When writers don't want to make up a new word, they'll often take a short, evocative term and capitalize it. The practice is still so commonplace that [[J. R. R. Tolkien|JRR Tolkien]] (who was a language professor at a respected university) decided to use a trick of combining '''Capital Letters Are Magic''' with commonplace words from [[Con Lang|languages he'd made up for fun in his spare time]] to create all of his fictional-but-now-well-known fantasy names. Here on [[Tropes Will Ruin Your Life|this site]] we get a lot of tropes this way as well, such as the [[The Load]] and [[The Chick]].<ref>Of course, some of that's due to the page naming conventions of PMWiki, the software that [[TV Tropes]] runs on; when we forked from them we of course inherited all the page names. And we've cleaned up the grammar in quite a few of those legacy names.</ref>
In universe, a character may comment on how they can "hear" the Capital Letters. Of course, this is easily explained as proper nouns have inflections, pauses, and emphasis that normal speech does not.
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* Used frequently by Katherine Kurtz in her [[Deryni]] works to distinguish magically-enhanced things/processes from analogous ordinary ones (healing vs. Healing, veil vs. Veil). Also used in particular phrases coined to describe magical objects and processes, such as Mind Seeing, Truth Reading, Truth Saying, Transfer Portal.
* More 'official' than 'magic, but ''Cryptonomicon'', by [[Neal Stephenson]], has a passage in which the main character navigated a small island. It is so small, in fact, that there is only one of most things-hence titles such as 'the Car', 'the Street', and 'the Squeegee'.
* [[Terry Pratchett]] also uses this, for example in [[
** This could have been the name of the forest, though, in which case it would have been justified.
* The [[Sci Fi]] Channel's miniseries ''[[The Lost Room]]'' is based around a series of about one hundred items called Objects that possess strange properties. Objects featured include The Key, The Pen, The Glass Eye and The Bus Ticket.
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