Topic on Forum:Trope Talk

I think HAD to Be Sharp should be renamed to Had to Be Sharp. I already did it, but apparently that was wrong (oops). I'm not sure the current capitalization was intended -- it's not used anywhere on the page, and it doesn't appear on the TV Tropes title because it's been overridden, possibly because the "real" title was a mistake. It could have been intentional and then someone decided to change it, but putting emphasis there seems strange to me. OTOH it's probably a quote from somewhere, and I don't know how the original character said it.

Any thoughts? I'm sure you've got plenty more important stuff to discuss, but I thought I should bring this up in the right place.

If the intention is to emphasize the first word, then "HAD to be Sharp" would be correct. If emphasis isn't required or desired, then "Had to be Sharp" would be correct. (One doesn't normally capitalize the verb "to be" in a title. Don't ask me why.) Do we want the added emphasis?

As for TVTropes, there are things that CamelCase makes difficult (such as not capitalizing the verb "to be" in a title). This may have been the intended capitalization all along... but we don't need to be bound by the original author's intent.

Really? My understanding was that "to be" is normally capitalized (see e.g. here or here). Also, isn't title case on TV Tropes done by customising the title somewhere, so you can put it in whatever case you want? I don't see why lowercase "be" should be any more difficult than any of the other modifications they make, like lowercase "to".

Re emphasis by the way, not that it matters but if you really want to emphasize something in a title without all caps, you could always use DISPLAYTITLE. That would look rather odd, though, and it wouldn't show up on links.

"Had to be sharp" in a metaphorical sense seems to be a moderately common phrase, and I don't know of it ever being used with emphasis on any word, but I haven't researched it in detail. I also wonder if it really belongs in the "esoteric" category -- is it that unintuitive?

Style guides and common usage are always tricky - there's always a guide somewhere that matches any given style. I think we'd best take a look at other page titles here and match whatever they use.

As for the phrase being common or uncommon, we have to worry about people with Small Reference Pools. Is it esoteric? I honestly don't know.

Searching for "is", "are" and "be" turned up mostly capital uses. The only lowercase ones I know of are All Women are Doms, All Men are Subs and Crack is Cheaper, and those were moved.

Then let's go with a capital "B".

I've just noticed SMURFING, where the all-caps seems even more inexplicable and it's not like that at all on TV Tropes (no overridden default). Hmm...

Yeah - I'd think we can smurf that one to mixed-case. EDIT:And it's smurfed.

So... I don't mean to be obnoxious, but is this thread going to go anywhere? I know you don't have that big a userbase and you've got other things to do here, so I guess I shouldn't expect too much. OTOH I think you've done a good job of keeping the place active so far what with being a fork and having the site go down multiple times.

Maybe someone else could comment? User:Looney Toons? (I'm not sure if that works or if it's ok)

Quite honestly, I don't feel strongly either way.

Why it was smurfed like this?

I have no idea.

When I moved "SMURFED" to "Smurfed", I gave an edit reason of "No need to shout". Does that apply here?