Jun 27 2007
wHy ThE cApiTaLiZaTiOn Of EvErY oThEr LeTtEr?
DiItAl cOnFrEnCeS
I don’t get it. Where did this idiotic affectation begin? Is this some stupid bleedover from the gamer subculture? “wOOt!” “pWnEd!”
I know every generation resorts to slang and obscurity to differentiate itself, but the retards who capitalize every other letter need to hang it up.
Some digging has yielded the information that this practice is known as “Studlycaps” or “camel caps” From the Wikipedia:
“According to the Jargon File “ThE oRigiN and SigNificaNce of thIs pRacTicE iS oBscuRe.” it appears to have been popularized among adolescent users during the BBS and early WWW eras of online culture, as a form of rebellion against the rules for proper capitalization of names and sentences. Unlike the use of all lowercase letters, which suggests laziness or efficiency as a motivation, StudlyCaps requires additional effort to type, either holding and releasing the Shift key with one hand while hunting-and-pecking, or alternately pressing one Shift key or the other while touch typing. The iNiQUITY BBS software based on Renegade had a feature to support this automatically.”
n07 2 m3N710n 7h3 4bU53 0F NuMb3R5 1n r3PL4c3M3n7 0f l3773r5… 45 1n:
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/
Why, oh why?
Yes my 15 YO godson does this and it has baffled me too. Do they not teach typing in high school anymore?
Umm…You know, Lenovo and IBM before it kind of, sorta engage in this practice too.
ThinkPad
ThinkLight
ThinkVantage
TrackPoint
UltraNav
MaxBrite
etc.
Curiously, the only name that I can think of in our marketing lexicon that doesn’t follow this convention is Ultrabay. It’s always been lower case, one word.
The precursor to this every other letter practice would have to be the intentional misspellings of words.
Kwik instead of quick
Brite instead of bright
etc.
MKohut refers to the EZmart dialect of English. I have never understood why anyone thinks naming the shop KwikkyMart or PikNPay would provide any commercial advantage. “Let’s shop there! They can’t spell!”
My brother and I have long called the KwikkyMart practice “small business phonetics.” My-T-Muffler is a teeth-grinding example. We thought about starting a business offering overnight phrasing and naming services. This would be a campaign against intentional miss-spellings, “placing things in quotes for no reason,” and creating plural’s in the seemingly most popular, but incorrect, fashion.
Matt –
The tech industry’s infatuation with innovative capitalization officially ended in my mind when Microsoft gave up the longstanding affectation of MicroSoft.
I wrote a story about Cisco for Forbes when they were lower-case “cisco” Copy desk would not permit a sentence to begin lowercase.
cisco turned into Cisco
Technical capitalisation is merely a useful technique for removing whitespace from variables, the alternative technique is to replace whitespace with underscores. However the purpose of these techniques is to maintain some readability – TheEndOfReadability is a little less readable than the_end_of_readability, but the later takes a little longer to type. Both are more readable than theendofreadability.
The alternative spellings of quick and bright is probably as much to do with legal issues as youth culture.
But nothing nearly as annoying as EvErY oThEr LeTtEr TyPeD iN cApS … UGH!!!
iT’s SiMpLe rEaLlY… aLt-CaPpIiNg iS fUnNy BECAUSE iT aNnOyS aDuLtS.