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Capital Letters Are Magic: Difference between revisions
updated TVT reference
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Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (updated TVT reference) |
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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>
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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