Endearing terms ... capitalize or no?

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Devil Ledbetter

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Cupcake, baby, darlin', sweetheart. In dialogue, are these capitalized like names and nicknames, or left lowercase?
 
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The male MC in my previous book called his lover babe and darlin' all the time and I didn't capitalise.
 

Millicent M'Lady

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In my experience, these are in lower-case unless an endearment has taken the form of a nickname and is regularly used in lieu of the person's name.

A personalised pet name, maybe based on a person's given name would be capitalised (damned if I can think of an example- it's late at night here!:) ). Otherwise, just leave it lower-case.
 

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Lower case unless they're being treated as a title; Most Exquisite Darling Cupcake of All Time, in which case, technically, they've suddenly become a proper noun, or, of course, they're the first word in a sentence.

Having said that, I notice that in a recent category romance I just downloaded, "Darling" is upper cased every time it's used.

This is *so wrong* I may have to have coffee to recover my equilibrium.
 

wannawrite

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Thank you! Very good question. I've wondered it, too. My hero's keep running around calling their sweeties names like 'pumpkin' and other nauseous things. I can't seem to stop them from doing it, so it's nice to know. No caps, huh? I'll remember that.
 

Devil Ledbetter

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Having said that, I notice that in a recent category romance I just downloaded, "Darling" is upper cased every time it's used.

This is *so wrong* I may have to have coffee to recover my equilibrium.
Maybe "Darling" is like "Lovey" on Gilligan's Island.
 
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