Capital Letters Are Magic: Difference between revisions
m
clean up
mNo edit summary |
m (clean up) |
||
Line 5:
''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
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.
Line 99:
* Storyteller Mark Lewis sometimes remarks that when he first read [[Winnie the Pooh]] he noticed that some words were capitalized even though they weren't proper nouns. Much later he asked a British friend why these words were capitalized, and said friend responded "Because they are Important."
* The [[Super Mario Bros.]] powerups are always capitalized. It's not a mushroom, it's a Super Mushroom, it's not a fire flower, it's a Fire Flower, etc.
* ''[[
* '''Magykal''' words in ''[[Septimus Heap]]'' are always capitalized.
* [[Discworld]]'s Death {{smallcaps|always speaks in small caps.}}
| |||