The spirit of Antinous lives on.
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Turning my Geek mode back on again, I think the point is that there are case sensitive and case insensitive usages. A URL should be assumed case insensitive, and written all miniscule. Proper nouns should retain their capitalisation, and not respecting that means the word is being distinguished from a common noun. Adding a majuscule anywhere means it is being used as a name.
Now if you will excuse me, I need to wipe off my frisbee with some kleenex before I paypal someone that I googled.
EDIT: I think I need to add a rule that majuscules never appear in verbs. If you do like I did above, then PayPal refers to the company, and paypalling just means transferring money through an online medium, not necessarily through Elon Muskās creation.
How should we capitalize IJsselmeer, the lake in the Netherlands?
Itās a proper noun. You can figure it out.
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It was also a rhetorical question.
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Yes, and also weāre going to start capitalizing E. E. Cummings properly!
Putting actual logos in a stream of text is horrible, I will certainly agree with you there, but iPhone and PayPal arenāt egregious intrusions of corporate advertising, theyāre the name of the product! Included in the name is the unusual capitalization rules.
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It was a sarcastic answer.
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Righto. I worked as a tech writer for ages and had training on the issues of protecting trademarks and copyrights when working with BellSouth which was very into keeping their intellectual property after losing the Yellow Pages logo/brand.
Anyway, itās true that other people do not need to protect intellectual property of other companies. For example, no one but Kleenex writes āKleenex brand tissueā because it is ridiculous. The company that owns Kleenex does it to protect their property from becoming an Official Regular Word, though of course it really already is. But we do not all need to help the Kleenex people along with their intellectual property project.
On the other hand, iPhone is a name in common use, the incaps is the proper and common way to spell it, and I, too, would correct Iphone as an error if I saw it in a presentation or writing. In fact, I just worked on a presentation where we were discussing iPhones and other consumer phones and we used the incaps throughout.
Whoa, I did not know that. I mean, I was dimly aware of MakieLab, and Iām sure I must have heard of them here, since Iām not really in the market for dolls. And a quick Googlingā¢ suggests that heās been pretty conscientious about noting the relationship, so fair enough. But that fact changes my guess about whatās going on here in this delightfully re-clickable work-holiday-dated thread.
The thing is, Cory wouldnāt be an even slightly bad person for momentarily forgetting that heād be goring his wifeās ox with this post. Or even for doing it deliberately (āHereās what I think of your precious InterCapping, darling! Also youāre a wonderful person and Iām grateful for every day I have with you!ā) because spouses do not have to present a united front in all things.
But if we assume that he cares about what his readers think on a personal, emotional level, in some way independent from how it affects clickthrough ratesāand thatās not a totally unreasonable assumption to make about BB as a wholeāthen I imagine heās feeling a bit chagrined at the response. (I imagine, because we havenāt heard back, and I doubt we will.) And if so, then the MakieLab angle is going to be the saltiest part of the wound, because the assumption weāre all making will be that he threw his wife under the bus, and that looks bad and would feel bad to have people thinking it, even if it really isnāt bad.
So Iām guessing that if we hear anything further, itāll be a Megyn Kelly-style āum, totally joking you guys! LOL I canāt believe you fell for my hilarious white-Santa joke, get a sense of humor already!ā sort of thing. And hell, maybe it was. So weāll see! This kind of thing can actually be a lot of fun when the topic makes it harder for the flame wars to devolve into the āyouāre a fascist/no youāre the fascistā ground-state of all internet discussions. Although we might get there yet!
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I canāt tell if youāre being ironic or just sincerely subscribing to Coryās philosophy of waging petty crusades against made-up grievances. Either way is behaving like an ass, but I suppose thatās just good tabloidism so carry on.
Which is completely on-topic because thatās the whole issue folks reasonably have with this entire sentiment: It doesnāt productively counteract the marketing that makes the products pervasive, it just encourages people to dwell on things more and nurse resentment, antagonizing completely neutral entities. InCaps is just a special jargon for CamelCase CoryDoctorow DoesnātLike, and frankly itās way more disgusting to invent invectives against perfectly neutral behaviors to antagonize certain people you donāt like (eg calling women sluts), than to simply capitalize proper nouns the way proper nouns are capitalized at the risk of (gasp!) representing a brand name un-spitefully without getting paid.
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It was slightly inappropriate languageā¦ and entirely for comic effect.
Apologies if anybody has said this above, but the first word of a sentence should always be capitalized, so if iPhone is the first word of a sentence, cap it. If itās in the body of a sentence, donāt cap it because itās a proper name and itās spelled how itās spelled.
Related point: If a number or year is the first word of a sentence, youāre supposed to spell it out, even if itās the title of a book by George Orwell.
I vehemently disagree. --bell hooks
IBM has a trademark for both the long and short versions of the name. The short form is not an abbreviation, it is itself a trademarked name: http://www.cipo.ic.gc.ca/app/opic-cipo/trdmrks/srch/vwTrdmrk.do?lang=eng&status=OK&fileNumber=0545833&extension=0&startingDocumentIndexOnPage=21
See? That thing that made you think āIām going to introduce the term āslutsā to this debate about grammar, and Iām going to suggest in passing that itās not really always an insultā ā that thing? It has a certain obvious scent to it and it is why bad things happen to some criticsā posting privileges but not others.
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Moderately relevant.
The Guardian does the same thing with acronyms vs initialisms, hence they write Nasa and not NASA.
It amuses me that one of my Usenet postings from decades ago has stuck in peopleās memory for so long. I remember I spent about a half hour trawling whois for amusing domain names. Hereās the original list, I expect most are now dead:
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A site called āWho Representsā where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain names, wait for it, is www.whorepresents.com
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Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at www.expertsexchange.com
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Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at www.penisland.net
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Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at www.therapistfinder.com
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Then of course, thereās the Italian Power Generator company. www.powergenitalia.com
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And now, we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales: www.molestationnursery.com
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If youāre looking for computer software, thereās always www.ipanywhere.com
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Welcome to the First Cumming Methodist Church. Their website is www.cummingfirst.com
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Then, of course, thereās these brainless art designers, and their whacky website: www.speedofart.com
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Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe? Try their brochure website at www.gotahoe.com
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I guess you wonāt like the penultimate paragraph here:
http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/new-ebay-promotional-codes-for-january-2013-423551.htm
I expect Cory will be more pissed off that a post about grammar got far more responses than his copyfight/privacy/disney postings do.
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What I intended to imply was that feminine promiscuity is an inherently neutral behavior, and the word slut exists purely for the sake of name-calling, and arguably has the side-effect of giving people a visceral disgust against promiscuous women (though thatās a chicken-and-egg debate), just as the word InCaps exists solely to make people hate CamelCase brand names. The ācertain obvious scentā of which you speak smells more to me like someoneās projecting her ideal political antithesis onto anything resembling a disagreement, but thatās the sort of extrapolation that I, for one, will try to avoid founding my prejudices on.
If you have such an emotional prejudice against someone daring to compare the words InCaps and slut, then I can offer another term: Jaywalking, which was a word specifically invented by automobile companies in the early 20th century to disparage people for using streets for what theyāve always been used for, which is walking. It originally implied a country bumpkin wandering into the street without looking, and has now come to mean a criminal who dares to trespass on the sacred territory of automobiles anywhere besides the designated pedestrian zones. Whether you like it or not, InCaps, jaywalker, and slut all belong to the same category of words that make otherwise acceptable behaviors shameful.
Edit: Since you impose reply limits on threads, wow, youāre really offended by the gender-nonspecific use of āherā arenāt you? What, you feel threatened when you think youāre being called a hypothetical girl? Grow up, he and they arenāt the only indefinite gender-nonspecific pronouns.
Double edit: Alright, if you say so. You can leave out the actual option C: That I donāt need to backtrack because I actually use her as an nonspecific indefinite and that I donāt give a damn about your sexual identity, but that would be too ingenuous and wouldnāt give you a petty moral victory. I get it, itās your little toybox and you need someone to play Indians to your Cowboy; and dammit, if nobody will actually wear feathers and make war whoops for you youāll sure as hell taunt āHeās a dirty Indian! Heās a dirty Indian! Bang! Youāre dead!ā I donāt have anything to prove to you or anyone who canāt see through your social alienation tactics, so have fun.
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