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_/]

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.