Some years ago I was an amused onlooker as about twenty
editors had a fierce and bloodthirsty battle over whether or not the Easter
Bunny deserved a capital B for bunny.
I’d edited a book where the Easter Bunny (or possibly bunny)
played a minor role. The author had given him two capital letters and that had
seemed correct to me.
Little did I know.
The battle raged back and forth for three days with
references from the Chicago Manual of Style (the bible for editors
internationally) being tossed like bombs into the fray.
Santa Claus gets two capital letters because that is his
name, Mr. Santa Claus, just as Ms. Jane Doe or Mr. John Doe would be
capitalized. But the Easter Bunny (bunny) is different. Easter is a proper noun
so it’s capitalized. But a bunny is just a bunny (lower case) unless his real
name is Mr. Bunny.
Then someone
mentioned the Tooth Fairy (or tooth fairy). Is she Ms. Tooth Fairy, or Ms.
Fairy (lowercase tooth) or… That caused the argument to reignite and continue
for another couple of days.
In the end the publisher declared it too difficult to decide
a winner from CMOS rules alone and directed that henceforth House Style would
be two capital letters for all such characters.
I noticed even Google is sitting on the fence for the Easter
Bunny with Wikipedia giving it a capital but the search engine using a
lowercase b.
Writing professionals take their job of being completely
accurate very seriously. So should all authors/aspiring authors.
Helen Woodall
Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and
non-fiction. Rates on application.
2 comments:
It's amazing how stupid Secularists are and how much they've dumbed down the university system. They're seriously debating whether or not to capitalize a proper name because of their stupid pathetic atheism/agnosticism.
Secularist beliefs are an absolute cancer to a healthy, Christian society.
Do you capitalize just Santa (Santa)?
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