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Capital Letters Are Magic: Difference between revisions
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(Import from TV Tropes TVT:Main.CapitalLettersAreMagic 2012-07-01, editor history TVTH:Main.CapitalLettersAreMagic, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license) |
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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 Gentlys 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 [[JRR Tolkien (Creator)|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 [[
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.
Ideally, this will give the concept a simple, descriptive name that doesn't sound too dopey. Unfortunately, this can cause [[
Alongside ordinary words that take on special new meanings, neologisms are frequently capitalized as well. If fantasy characters talk about smeerps instead of Smeerps, then it may throw the reader off. (Even if these characters are Smeerp farmers who wouldn't think of the animals as "special", and who also ride horses instead of Horses.) Well-established fantasy concepts, such as dragons and vampires, don't get this treatment. It seems that lowercase words feel more orthodox and "official", and it's therefore incorrect for a fictional world to have a "new" one without the characters somehow noticing that something is different.
[[Brand Names Are Better]] is another example of the effect. After the "magic" has gone away, you get [[Stuck On Band
Compare [[The Trope Without a Title]] and [[We Will Use Wiki Words in The Future]] (when two or more simple words are used in this way). Contrast [[Call a Rabbit A Smeerp]], which is putting fantastical names to common things. A popular alternative is [[Phantasy Spelling]], though such terms are often also capitalized.
{{examples
'''Metaphysical Concepts:'''
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* [[Dan and Mabs Furry Adventures|DMFA]] has [[Muggles|Beings]], with sapient non-Being creatures being Creatures.
* [[The Sandman|The Endless]]
* And, in possibly the least creative example ever: [[
* [[The Seventh Tower|The Chosen]]
* Originally, [[Starcraft|the Zerg and the Protoss]], although they were knocked down to lowercase letters later on, because real-life species names aren't capitalized.
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