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

[http://users.livejournal.com/_jems_/]

See, I was also thinking it was a brand name, but you're right that it'd probably have evolved away from that.

Add to that the general schizophrenic thing I've got going between Swedish and English were nations are capitalized, but not nationalities and you've got the makings of one very confused fangirl.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. Just today, when I copyedited a piece, I lowercased communist per Associated Press style, which we follow. the proofer told me I needed to uppercase it, and I said, but! AP! And she said it's our house style to uppercase the party but not the belief system (or maybe it's the other way around, I'm bewildered and totally disagree), and I was thinking, how the hell can people keep ridiculous things like that right? I think that's interesting about not capping nationalities -- I didn't know that!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_jems_/]

We also don't do it with languages. Basically, capitalization is only for names. So if I ever don't capitalize it's usually because I'm confused as to what language I'm writing in. You'd be amazed how many times I can't recall which language I've translated something into.