Forum:Capitalizing the bending arts

Forums: War Room → Capitalizing the bending arts

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The bending arts won't be capitalized
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In Avatar: The Last Airbender—The Art of the Animated Series, whenever waterbending, earthbending, firebending, and airbending are mentioned, they are capitalized, e.g. "Waterbending" and "Earthbending". The original Nick website for A:TLA does the same thing. The validity of Nick.com in this argument is that many of the images provided on the site are the exact same images that can be found listed as concept art drawn by Bryan Konietzko in The Art of the Animated Series. This suggests (as in, I'm speculating, I'll get to that in a minute) that the capitalization was taken from the creators' work as well. Disclaimer: However, this tidbit may be discounted by anyone who wishes to see it in the light of coincidence, since that is a totally reasonable viewpoint; I just wanted to bring my own speculation (that is, the correlation between the capitalization on the site and the capitalization in the book) to the table in case anyone else saw this in the way I do. Everything else about the concept art and nick.com's use of it is not speculative. End disclaimer

Now to the nitty-gritty: there was a forum consensus that ruled against capitalizing the bending arts a while back, which can be seen and read right here. In that forum, the bending arts were called "like sports", as in simple activities, so logic would suggest that such things do not deserve capitalization grammatically speaking. It was also mentioned that we abandoned the capitalization of animal species names for the sake of our own grammar terms and that the site had "lower editorial standards" than us.

To combat these, I'll start with the comparison to animals and how that comparison ties with the point of being "like sports": I've always found it odd that we speculate that all the animals in the Avatar world are not considered sacred enough in their own rights to deserve the capitalization that they're given on the site, but that's a fight for another forum that I do not currently have time to make. Plus, there could be a myriad of other reasons why they were capitalized on the site as well as in the book that we don't even know of, but it's speculation to revert what was said on a canonically-accepted site and book about the show because we think it to be incorrect. Now if they had only been capitalized a few times, once in a blue moon, then the case would be different, but it's not. Therefore, the animals aside for the moment, the bending arts should not be put to lowercase as they have been for this reason. Furthermore, on the point of lower editorial standards would evaporate if this explanation is taken to heart.

And to dispute the grammar claim, and someone tell me if I'm being too literal: "waterbending". It has been written as one word both on the site, in the art book, and on our wiki. Instead of hyphenating it to become "water-bending", which would alleviate the obvious fact that waterbending is not a word and would make it grammatically-correct, we keep it as "waterbending". Why? Not one canonically-undisputed source has ever spelled it as "water-bending" or even "water bending", but almost unanimously as "Waterbending", both as one word and capitalized (don't think about the cap, though, just the spelling for now). That rules out the idea that it was taken from the canon sometime in the far past of the wiki, and even if it was taken from canon, according to the consensus on that forum, it should have been changed a long time ago. So, why is it that despite us having removed waterbending's supposedly incorrect capitalization, we still keep it as one grammatically-incorrect word?

I think I've addressed everything that was stated in the other forum, right? If not, someone tell me and I'll see if I can dispute it, as well. Krazykid51 00:30, November 27, 2012 (UTC)

No. I don't see why we should go back to capitalizing the forms as that still doesn't make sense, even after what you said.

The point about animals being "sacred", that doesn't make much sense. Nick.com has the tradition to capitalize nearly everything. They use title case and they keep using that in the body of the text itself. We used to do that as well, but then we changed the using sentence case in the body of the text by practice. Why? Cause it doesn't look good, nor does it have a grammatical rule to back it up that it should be capitalized.

And no, we never said that we think they were incorrect to capitalize that. To sum up the entire argument perfectly, I'll just quote 888's statement of the other forum:

"Sometimes other publications that aren't encyclopedias or references works like to capitalise certain extra things for emphasis. It doesn't necessarily mean that we should blindly follow these practices simply because they were 'official'."

I always cringe a bit when people on here start making their points by comparing everything to each other like it is perfectly comparable. Personally, I see an enormous difference to lower case something in a body of text and completely alter it's way of spelling by inserting a hyphen. The spelling is kept in line of the official sources. Now, why lower case it then? Because it is standard practice to lower case words on this wiki. It is our practice to use sentence case, something the official sources hardly ever practice.

So to sum up why they're lowercased and should be that way -also without altering any spelling: the spelling comes from the official source, the lowercasing from our own wiki practice and layout. Lady Lostris /  SOAP 07:45, November 27, 2012 (UTC)

I still don't quite get how we can just decide that it's okay for us to lowercase the bending arts. I understand your outlook fully, on the grammar side of things. However, if you don't mind, I'll be ruling out the point of "Cause it doesn't look good" from the list of reasons to keep things as they are. To be frank, I don't see how putting the goal of making things pretty ahead of accuracy fits into this wiki's standards.

So that leaves three arguments:

"Nick.com has the tradition to capitalize nearly everything. They use title case and they keep using that in the body of the text itself,"

the encyclopedia card, and

"I see an enormous difference to lower case something in a body of text and completely alter it's way of spelling by inserting a hyphen. The spelling is kept in line of the official sources. Now, why lower case it then? Because it is standard practice to lower case words on this wiki. It is our practice to use sentence case, something the official sources hardly ever practice."

Before I bring up my next points, I'll let you know that your use of the words "nearly" and "hardly ever" is noted and I've taken it into account for the argument.

I checked around on the pages of Nick.com's "Creatures" sections. The otter penguin, Appa (which made mention of the flying bison in lowercase), Momo (which made mention of the flying lemur in lowercase), elephant koi, canyon crawler, turtle seal, platypus bear, catgator, saber-tooth moose lion, "the serpent", bear, dragonfly, pygmy puma, sealguana, cavehopper (which should, according to this site's grammar rules, probably be "cave hopper" on the wiki b/c usually the hyphens are simply replaced with spaces), clam, smoked sea slug (which might be a better article as "Sea slug" that mentions the fact that it is edible and can be cooked), badgerfrog, and eel hound articles all mentioned the animals in their bio sections without uppercase, despite the fact that nearly every one of the bios made use of title case.

Only the unagi, sooty copper fritillary, se tu, shirshu, buffalo yak, ostrich horse, badgermole, mongoose dragon, Knowledge Seekers (which we have, for reasons beyond me considering the policy, kept uppercase even here), boar-q-pine, sour beetle, and toucan puffin articles capitalized the names within the bios. The Cat owl is in the gray as the title of the bio is "Catowl", but in the bio itself it is called a "Cat-Owl". I would simply have linked all these articles, but the nick.com site does not allow it, so you can check my work if you want.

Not counting the weird old cat owl, the end result of the tally is 19-to-11, with the lowercase creatures coming out the victor. That's thirty eligible articles in all, the "lowercase-use-in-bios-despite-title-case" with over half (63% to be exact) of those articles. There were a few articles more that are missing from this tally as their names were only mentioned in the titles of the bios and therefore cannot be compared for title-vs-sentence case in comparison to actual use in-context.

So no, Nick.com does not have "the tradition to capitalize nearly everything" or "use title case and [...] keep using that in the body of the text itself." On the contrary, it is quite the opposite. Then why on Earth should we go along with our own tradition to lowercase the bending arts which are unanimously uppercase, unlike the animals with a still high majority of 63%?

The encyclopedia claim can be wrapped up by this sentence: the bending forms were not capitalized for emphasis, if not already made obvious by my huge lists and tallies above; rather, some words are uppercase and some are lowercase (though again, the bending arts are unanimously uppercase) because [INSERT WHATEVER REASON OF WHICH WE DO NOT KNOW HERE, BUT THAT WOULD BE SPECULATION SO LEAVE IT ALONE]; do to this discovery, it would not be "blindly follow[ing]" to uppercase the bending arts (nor the animals, but again, for another forum).

I don't particularly enjoy hyphens either, Lady, but hear this: the wiki altered the spelling that should have been "in line with official sources" when it removed the hyphens from the names of animals that were stated as such on Nick.com. So it's okay to alter the cases of water, earth, fire, and airbending, and you say that spelling should be kept in line of official sources, so why have we stopped spelling animal names with hyphens and inserted spaces in their places? To be clear, you say that we shouldn't put hyphens to fix the spelling of a word because that would be keeping from the spelling from the official sources, so then why should we remove hyphens from the names of animals, cause those hyphens are from official sources, and spaces aren't. Krazykid51 22:52, November 27, 2012 (UTC)

On a broader scope, nick has the standard of using title case as I randomly clicked a few pages and found the Mechanist consistently capitalized as well as the lion turtle (granted, I didn't go through ever page, I just randomly clicked two).

For your "why should we do differently", I already stated that before. I have no intention of making this a forum where I constantly copy/paste myself (or others).

I'm sorry, but I just don't understand the point you're trying to make in the paragraph after that, so I can't say anything about that.

Why have we stopped there: the majority of the animals is without hyphen, with the exception of a few -seeing how nick makes lots of mistakes, that could very well be an oversight. Is that a conclusive argument? Of course not, though there is something to be said that it is extremely weird that the majority is without hyphens with the exception of those -I believe it were 9 pages that were changed- few pages. So why was that changed? One word answer: consistency.

As for the bending forms, there is a clear consistency there: no hyphen, written as one word.

Now before you come with the argument "but the official sources consistently capitalize the bending forms", I'm already going to refer to what was said about that before and the answer could thus be found there. Lady Lostris /  SOAP 23:04, November 27, 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Lady Lostris. Firstly, your arguement that relies on the authority of nick is completely illogical. According to you logic, we should capitalize all bending arts simply because nick does; continuing to follow your logic, we should use figures of speech on articles and feel free to write sentence fragements since nick does. Obviously, we should avoid both of those writing practices if we wish to maintain a respectable online encyclopedia. Instead, we follow the grammar of standard American English and the spelling provided by nick. None of the bending arts meet any of the criteria for capitalizing words in conventional American English. Waterbending and the rest of the bending arts are just arts and are not proper nouns. In standard American English, art forms such as painting and sketching are not usually capitalized and neither are martial arts like karate. WEFAang (wall • contribs) 05:52, November 28, 2012 (UTC)

I suppose I'll use this free time of mine to make another statistical tally, this time of the use of title case on nick.com. Some articles, like before, did not mention the title of that article again in the bio, so they could not be compared. And don't worry, I know that you only skimmed through the couple of articles, Lostris, so I understand why you were under the impression that title case was dominant. These lists are to prove that impression wrong:

The biographies for the sanctuary of Crescent Island's Crescent Island Fire Temple, pirate ship boutique, pirates, canyon guide, tsungi horn, airbender kids, Agni Kai chamber, abbey, tavern, herbalist institute, baboon spirit, Ocean and Moon spirits, white dragon bush, Omashu sewer system, Avatar Day festival, Lee family pig farm, tank train, sand "sailor" (even I can agree that the spelling for this one had to be changed), ferry, Ba Sing Se's outer wall + agrarian zone + lower ring, rock gloves, "new apartment", tangle mines, wind surfboard, jet skis, Piandao's castle, Sokka's sword, Sozin's dragon, scroll, military messenger, Royal servants, Mai's house, viscous slime, coolers, gondola guards (with "gondola" capitalized in the bio in an instance when only referring to the gondola, likely a typo b/c "gondola" was not capitalized once in the bio for the actual gondolas), interrogation room, "The Melonlord", and Ozai's airship all use lowercase when describing their respective items.

Only the bios for warden, Earth Kingdom harbor, panda lily, the Cave of Two Lovers, trebuchet operators, earth wave, Eclipse glasses, Booby traps (with only the "B" in "booby" capitalized in the bio but both capitalized in the title, likely a typo), bully guard, gondolas, "The" Southern Raiders, lion turtle, and coronation temple and plaza (with only the "C" in "coronation" capitalized, likely a typo) capitalize the items.

Not counting the creatures section, that's 40 without title-case-within-bio and only 13 with. That equals out to 75.5% of most articles in sentence case. Adding the creatures sections to the mix: 59-to-24, or 71.1% w/sentence case within bios, a high majority if I may say so myself. So that's one point down, with the "broader scope" of nick.com not using title case.

I'm sorry for not making myself clear on my "why should we do differently" question and encyclopedia claim; the "why" question was meant to be rhetorical, that was my fault. As for the argument against 888's encyclopedia ideal: what I meant by "the bending forms were not capitalized for emphasis, if not already made obvious by my huge lists and tallies above" was the fact that 888 said that they were only capitalized for some kind of emphasis, with which I do not agree. I think that they were capitalized for a different reason; that reason is exemplified by the tallies mixed with my paragraphs refuting WEF's arguments further below. I hope you understand what I mean once you see these points all together.

Hyphen time, eh? This is first time in this forum when statistics have gone against me - you were right in that the use of hyphens was highly sporadic and patternless; at no point when I was looking did I find any consistency in how the site decided hyphenation. If I had it with me right now, I'd cross-reference the use of the hyphen for "Lop-eared rabbit" ("long-eared rabbit" in the second source) in Art of the Animated Series, but I left the book elsewhere. However, I do plan to check that out as well as any other animals that may have also appeared in the art book once I get the chance, though those facts likely will not be presented in this forum due to the fact that I have no way of getting my hands back on my copy of the book for a while. By checking with the book, I will be able to see if it and the nick.com site use hyphenation for those select creatures, to see if there is any consistency to be found.

@WEF: You did not see my entire argument, apparently. You appear to think that I rely solely on nick.com for my claims about capitalizing the bending arts, as supported by your saying "According to you logic, we should capitalize all bending arts simply because nick does," which is untrue. I've consistently made comparisons to The Art of the Animated Series' use of capitalization as well as nick.com's. You jump to conclusions, too; believing that I advocate sentence fragments and common figures of speech is a bit of a leap from "we should use canonically-presented information from a trusted website and a trusted book," is it not?

I understand that this site follows the rule of conventional American English, and I naturally prefer that as I live in the States; I don't, however, agree with your point about the bending arts being simple activities that do not deserve nor require capitalization. It is true that they are, in fact, activities, and if they were average activities, then I'd be a bit less likely to want them to be capitalized. But really, they're not average activities, right? A better word that could be used to describe them, in my opinion, would be arts. No, that's not my choice, actually, but the one used in the show and... well, plenty of other places. Now I know that art forms are not usually capitalized in American English, either, just hear me out.

The bending arts are mystical, spiritual, ancient arts of intense history and significance throughout the World of Avatar. Now then, with the above mentioned context in which the arts are spoken in mind coupled with the fact that this is a fictional world - and fictional works sometimes capitalize like this; I'd go as far as to say that this sort of capitalization method is super common - is it really that far of a stretch to believe that the reasons that so many official sources capitalize the arts are those factors? I'll pull a Lostris card here and say this: is this a conclusive argument? No, of course not; both my reasoning for capitalizing bending (in this sense) and her reasoning for removing hyphens are slightly speculative, but I'd find it odd if there was no good reason for the capitalization of bending to be so thorough. Krazykid51 02:01, November 29, 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, this was discussed before, so I don't really feel like going on about it, so I'll just point out that the bending arts are not proper names, and just like real world fighting styles (karate, judo, taekwondo, jiu-jitsu, etc), there's no reason, besides in-universe speculation, to capitalize them. ― Thailog 02:14, November 29, 2012 (UTC)

@Krazykid51, I never said the entirety of your arguement relied on nick.com; in fact, I made sure that they read nick (notice the lack of the ".com"). Therefore, almost all of your arguement does rely on the authority of nick as I originally claimed. And, yes, you are right fictional works do capitalize words that are central to the meaning; however, since we write an in-universe encyclopedia, we should not follow the style choices of a company that does not share the same goals. Instead, we should stick to standard American English which does not include a rule for capitalization applicable to an art form like waterbending. As for the bending arts being mystical and spiritual arguement, mindreading is also considered mystical and spiritual, but it is not capitalized in any general encyclopedia or dictionary of prestige. I am sure that a book or website solely dedicated to explaining mindreading has capitalized the word "mindreading" to emphasis its importance and may have even been used a reference source for encyclopedias, yet no high standards encyclopedia would follow suit. We have a similar relationship with Nick-- that is to say that we get our information from nick, but we don't necessarily adopt their style choices. With that and my previous arguements being said, I still maintain my original belief that the bending arts remain uncapitalized. WEFAang (wall • contribs) 04:02, December 1, 2012 (UTC)

@Thailog I came to make this forum after deciding to review the information presented in the previous one about bending capitalization. Although it has been discussed before, I saw some things that I'd wanted to point out and make a new forum about, as seen in this whole thing. And I wouldn't call it "in-universe speculation" to go on with believing that the creators simply capitalized the bending arts for no reason.

@WEF According to the book's disclaimer-like page, only "Nickelodeon, Nickelodeon Avatar: The Last Airbender, and all related titles, logos, and characters are trademarks of Viacom International, Inc.", followed by "All other material, unless otherwise specified, is © 2010 Dark Horse Comics, Inc." Everything else in the book, including spelling, was written and put together by the creators and edited solely by Samantha Robertson, a Dark Horse employee, so my argument is not nearly fully reliant on Nickelodeon nor Viacom. Now then, a Dark Horse employee surely wouldn't capitalize all of the bending arts herself, would she? The creators wrote the book themselves, that's doubtless, and the spelling was handled by an impartial editor who didn't change what the writers said.

As evidenced by my above comment, I got AAS back into my hands sooner than expected. Although the hyphenation isn't too big an issue with all of the other things I've presented, I'll give the results of my cross-referencing the book with nick.com. For one, Lop-eared rabbit is hyphenated in both sources, but the capitalization used in the title of the bio on nick.com conflicts with the capitalization in the book; however, as title case in the actual tile (as in, not in the biographical sections) is used quite commonly on the site and the rabbit's name is not presented in the bio, this capitalization cannot be rightfully compared. Also, the hyphenation simply follow common English rules, so that's nothing for either argument, I suppose.

Canyon crawler on the site as well as in the book is not capitalized nor hyphenated. Shirshu conflicts in capitalization, with the book going lowercase. Turtle seal in both sources is not capitalized, but in the book it is hyphenated with the site going without. Turtle duck also hyphenates in the book and goes without caps, so each of the turtles follows a similar pattern. Upon re-checking the site, the name for the trebuchet operators is not mentioned in the bio, so it should be taken from the tally; however, I will not redo the tally for such a marginal change in my opinion's favor. If this seems suspicious to anyone, I can supply a screenshot or you can check the site yourself if you like, to verify my claim. The book does not capitalize trebuchet operators.

The capitalization for moo-sow conflicts on both sites, but all of the forms of hybrid pig that we would normally remove hyphens from (but for same reason have not on this wiki, although I certainly don't mind) have hyphens in both sources. The capitalization for platypus bear agrees, though hyphenation differs - the site uses no hyphenation, the book does. Otter penguin in the book uses hyphenation and no caps, while otter penguin is never mentioned on the site and cannot be compared.

What is the source for our spelling of "rabaroo"? It goes unmentioned on the site, and in the book it is spelled "rabbiroo".

Koala sheep is hyphenated and not capitalized in the book, but neither of these factors can be compared to the site as its name is not mentioned beyond the title casing of the bio. Gemsbok bull is hyphenated non-cap in the book, no comparison on site. Komodo rhino is without hyphenation on the site, with in book, no comparison for caps. Wolfbat is one word on site, hyphenated in book, no caps comparison. The sealguana is called the "iguana-seal" in the book, no caps in either.

Buzzard wasp is hyphenated in both sources, no caps comparison. Aardvark sloth is hyphenated in book, no caps, no comparison to site whatsoever. Badger mole, I just noticed now, is extremely inconsistent: in the book, it is called "badger-mole". On the site's title for the bio as well as a few times within the bio, it is called "badgermole"; capitalization cannot be compared in this form of badgermole as when the name appears in the bio, it is the first word of the sentence. At the end of the bio, however, it is called "badger mole", no caps (and not at the beginning of the sentence for that matter), no hyphen. I say stick with what we've got on this one: no caps, no space, no hyphen.

Swamp monster is capitalized in the book, lowercase on the site. Mongoose dragon is called "mongoose-lizard" in the book. Foo Foo Cuddlypoops should be renamed "Foo Foo Cuddly Poops" according to the book. The spelling and hyphenation matches up for the unusual name of "moose-lioness" in both sources.

Serpent is not capitalized in both sources. Boar-q-pine spelling and caps checks out in both sources (but possibly not notably, it is spelled "boarcupine" in a comic that I read recently). Dragon caps fit too; I missed it in my initial survey, but it goes without caps on the site. Flying bison goes non-capitalized and unhyphenated, both sources.

Lion turtle is capitalized on Nick but not in the book, hyphenated in the book but not on Nick.

I won't do another tally because the repercussions of the book's input are obvious: there are too many inconsistencies to even consider the site animal-wise. The book takes the superior canon stance as it is directly from the creators and much more recent than the site. Nowhere in AAS is an animal's species name capitalized. All info on the nick.com website should be disregarded concerning grammar and spelling in compliance with common grammar rules; however, in my opinion, all of this should be aken as lower than the canon of Art of the Animated Series.

BUT, something useful did arise from me checking the book. According to the translations in the book, the wanted posters presented in the series capitalized "firebender", "firebending", and "airbending", and the waterbending scroll capitalized "waterbending". Note that these usages of capitalization were in the series itself, no "ifs" "ands" or "buts" about it. Krazykid51 18:18, December 1, 2012 (UTC)

As you just proved: sources conflict, thus often leaving one conclusion: there is not set "right way", thus it is the most logical to take the way that is most in line with the wiki's MoS and general writing habit. As Thailog pointed out before, nearly all of this was discussed before, so there is little point in repeating everything now, even if you want to put some emphasis on some things. Unless more people decide to enter in this debate and want to move back to capitalization of the bending forms, there is no reason to do that at this moment.

As for the rabaroo spelling: it comes from the TLoK: Welcome to Republic City game --> Red Sands Rabaroos. Lady Lostris /  SOAP 18:59, December 1, 2012 (UTC)

While I still hold to my opinion that the bending arts should be capitalized, there is not enough verifiable information to go on at the moment. However, the one piece of evidence that I will hold on to even when this debate ends (which it will do now as there are no more sources left to exhaust - I've practically made a tally for everything already xD) is the wanted poster and scroll tidbits. They're the only known sources that mention the bending forms in written word aside from the site and the art book, as far as I know. Discounting the comics, of course, not because of their canonicity (as it has been established that they are canon), but because of how every letter in the comics is in caps. But in the way the wanted posters and scroll wrote the arts, they were capitalized. I'll have to try to remember that if another source comes up that will help me validate my claims.

Until then, though, we have no choice but to stick with MoS. I do think this discussion was somewhat productive, however. It is certainly more conclusive than the last one, wherein only shallow mentions of the book were brought up and knowledge of nick.com's use of title case and grammar were severely lacking. Also, parallels are always a fair way to help make decisions, and here the comparisons between the book and the website made things very clear. Krazykid51 19:29, December 1, 2012 (UTC)