Sunday, December 9, 2012

Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy et al




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:

Anonymous said...

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.

Kathy Landes Mayer said...

Do you capitalize just Santa (Santa)?