Is there a workaround to the situation of when using sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend" lowercase titles appear after uppercase, and thus aren't truly 'sorted by title'?

I have a requirement for some titles (generic terms) to be all lower case and others (proper names) to be upper case.

One part of the install displays as a cloud, and lower-casing of all but proper names looks better - and thus can't use lower_case="1" for the cloud. although it would fix the sort order issue when displaying as a regular list.