Welcome, friends, to what is becoming a recurring occasion where I just talk about silly Star Wars linguistics, apparently. Over the weekend, Lucasfilm story group member Matt Martin blew my mind with a shocking revelation: The Empire Strikes Back’s Tauntauns aren’t Tauntauns.
They’re…tauntauns.
Just so we’re all clear: this is a “tauntaun”, not a “Taun Taun”, “TaunTaun”, “Ton Ton” or even “Tauntaun”. pic.twitter.com/SGZ3thqU7z
— Matt Martin (@missingwords) September 3, 2020
As Martin went on to explain, he wasn’t correcting people who have dared to defy Star Wars’s official glossary inadvertently all these years, because, well, gatekeeping such an odd thing in the first place would be weird. He was just hoping to shine a light on the kinds of bizarre things Lucasfilm’s story group has to keep in mind while shaping and maintaining the Star Wars world as we know it. It’s not just about making sure the timeline all tracks up and that it’s Mitth’raw’nurodo, not Mitth’rawn’nuro’do or what have you, but dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s of a terminology far, far away. The Jedi librarians of our world, if you will: same love of books, just without the lightsabers.
[referenced id=”1238078″ url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2020/08/chiss-names-are-some-of-star-wars-coolest-bullshit/” thumb=”https://gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/07/e7zp5ctv9lkbifshujbu-300×169.png” title=”Chiss Names Are Some of Star Wars’ Coolest Bullshit” excerpt=”Star Wars is full of cool bullshit which is, in many ways, why we love such an absurd behemoth in the first place. Space wizards with laser swords? Extremely bullshit, and very cool (some of the time). Blaster pistols? They go pew pew, what’s not to love. Starfighters? They go…”]
But it’s not that such a vast franchise of interconnected texts has its own wretched hive of copy editors and fact checkers that is mindblowing here, but the reason as to why you don’t capitalise tauntaun. It’s because the denizens of the Star Wars galaxy don’t consider these proud, smelly steeds to be sentient beings.
If you’re wondering “why isn’t it capitalized?” first off: I appreciate you. Second, the general rule is that sentient species are capitalized while creatures are not, although “human” isn’t capitalized for some reason…
— Matt Martin (@missingwords) September 3, 2020
What the hell, Star Wars? What the hell.
You capitalise most Star Wars aliens and beings we know of — Bith, Twi’lek, Chiss, Gungan. Humans, outside of the start of a sentence presumably, are not, because collectively Star Wars humans aren’t considered a collective unit with a singular home like we are: humans from Coruscant are Coruscanti, humans from Corellia are Corellians, humans from Naboo are the Naboo, and so on. The peoples of the Star Wars galaxy just…don’t consider tauntauns sentient beings, which is probably why Han’s totally fine going “congrats on not freezing before the first marker fluffy pal, just gonna gut your corpse and use it as a sleeping bag” and being as ethically satisfied as any scruffy lookin’ nerfherder might be. Oh god, poor nerfs. And porgs. No wonder Chewie wanted to eat one!
Continuing to speak to the Star Wars galaxy’s gross attitudes to various lifeforms, Martin also noted in the replies to his tweet that this is why Droids are in fact droids (outside of the most lucrative Star Wars source of all, of course: product packaging), because humans and other self-aware species are really not cool a lot of the time.
So yes. Next time you go to tweet about the best Star Wars creature (sorry, again, to porgs), remember to keep that lower case intact. Because Star Wars nerds of all know that there’s nothing more correct than being grammatically correct!