Monday, September 6, 2010

Why You Should Capitalize the Names of Pokémon

Pokémon is the term used to describe a type of organism like plant or animal. Following this logic, you would not need to capitalize it when using it in that way. However, the individual names of pokémon should always be capitalized. Why? Because they are all different species of pokémon, and you capitalize species names, scientific or layman's. You would capitalize Growlithe the same way you would German Shepard.

To borrow from Wikipedia: "Proper nouns (also called proper names) are nouns representing unique entities (such as London, Jupiter, or Toyota), as distinguished from common nouns which describe a class of entities (such as city, planet, person or car)." As each species of pokémon is a unique entity belonging to a larger group, it should be capitalized.

In the end, who cares anyway??

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