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Why do many on this forum enjoy capitalizing random common nouns?

There's a certain kind of emphasis that's appropriate for Capitalised Things. It's kind of visual shorthand for when you're careful to enunciate.
 
Capitalizing random common nouns is what Serebii does. What these people do, as far as I've seen, is capitalizing for emphasis, as a way of transferring some of the implications of uniqueness and importance of proper nouns onto concepts that aren't. So, for example, "I don't really think that's an important thing" vs. "I don't really think that's an Important Thing" is the distinction between merely saying you don't think something is important, on the one hand, and implying there is a special category of things called Important Things and you don't think this is one of them, on the other. In the latter scenario, it may be somewhat important, but it's not important enough to be considered one of the Important Things.

So, in other words, it's using capitalization to apply a nuance. Feel free to think it's grammatically nonsensical, but it's certainly not random.
 
I didn't know it was a Serebii thing! :o but I think I've browsed Serebii forums maybe once.
 
Serebii is English! But that's the English education system fo WHO SAID THAT

But yeah, it's just a kind of emphasis that kinda stresses the beginnings of each word? So italicising the whole word isn't appropriate, but Capitalising It For Emphasis is!
 
If I /really/ want to emphasize something, I'm much more inclined to italicize or fake!italicize using slashes.
Click to expand...

I think I tend to emphasize things in a vaguely varied way, actually??? But I'm not really meta enough about my typing to tell; I just do whatever seems to fit best at the time. Sometimes that means random caps.

... I think it would be kind of interesting, though, to have everyone here do something similar to that quote? But more standardized, I mean, and also somewhat broader; some generic survey about how you'd stress certain sentences/write ideas
 
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