Things that make me go huh?

[gwyn]

Why do people always lowercase the h in human, but uppercase the C in Cylon? I would like to start a campaign to stamp out the indiscriminate title-casing of selective species. When I realized this discrepancy, I started lowercasing the c, but people like to gently "correct" me in posts. Cylon is neither a product/brand name nor an organization (Firefly-class ship, Nexus 6 replicant, the Alliance, the Mounties, Browncoats), nor a nationality/continental/planetary identity (Canadian, African, Bajoran, Betelgeusian, Vulcan), nor a religious identification (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) though admittedly, it could become that eventually. It's a classification no different than human in the series, yet across fandom, people treat it as more significant by uppercasing the c.

Comments

[jidabug.livejournal.com]

So the same thing would apply to Trek fandom: vulcans and romulans and klingons (oh my). It seems to me that I usually see those capitalized.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

It's the problem of descriptors. We use human race to distinguish ourselves, but it's, as Melina talks about above, a species issue. So, in SF, you have species with planetary names (Vulcan, etc.), but here, we have only the silly Earthlings. We don't generally go for Earthers. The tag that we provide, then, for our planetary species identification is human (race). Which doesn't equate to cylon as a species/race, either. They could be Caprican cylons, or maybe Kobolian (Kobolite?) cylons... or something else, but they would still be semantically equivalent to human if you were saying the same thing about humans.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

Also, this is how I generally give myself headaches.