As a copy editor it irritates me when organisations adopt names that don’t use capital letters. The practice has become common in the internet age.
It defies all grammatical rules for a name to be uncapitalised.
I’m a ruthless anti capitalist and kill stray capitals whenever I see them, especially in titles. The president of the Lions Club does not warrant a capital P.
With such a knife-wielding attitude to capitals, one might assume that I welcome the radicalism of names being uncapitalised, but I don’t. It’s an affront to decency, a marketing ploy that has corrupted the language.
How can I justify to readers and cadet journalists that a sentence may begin with a lower case letter? It’s just not on.
A name is a proper noun and should carry a capital letter; eBay should be Ebay, mBox should be Mbox.
Being a cynical, paranoid type I seriously suspect the influence of marketers in shaping this evil practice. They create these names so they will stand out. And they do, like the proverbial anatomy of an unhairy dog.
Earlier this year the worthy charitable organisation Anglican Community Care changed its name to the grammatically dreadful ac.care. What a conundrum for newspapers!
As an editor I dread seeing stories about them because of the linguistic ethical dilemma. I wax between grief and anger every time I see the name.
It’s just wrong. They pronounce it AC care, not ac care.
Of course I avoid starting sentences with uncapitalised names, I just can’t bring myself to do it. But a name is a name and if it appears in a sentence it should be spelt as the name appears. Cringe.
We live in a highly regulated society, however it astounds me that while you have to wear a helmet to ride a bicycle 200 metres there are no limits on bastardising the language.
There should be a law against names without capitals. It should be impossible to register them or trade under them.
Not only is there widespread confusion about capitalisation, but also with American “English”
I am disappointed at how many Australians now use American verb burglarized instead of the English burgled.
I was amused to read the following headline from last Friday’s Murray Pioneer
“Vehicles damaged, burglarised”!
Interesting that the “z” bothered the copy writer, but not the whole abomination of a word!
Some interesting statistics on its usage at: http://www.chaucery.com/fun/dialecticon/?phrase1=burglarized&phrase2=burgled
Twitter: mgorey
says:
“Burglarize” … that’s terrible, I didn’t even know it was a word.
I’m not too hung up on American spelling, especially for -or words and program. I mentioned here once before that Australian newspapers used -or spellings in the 19th century and it remained house style for many publishing companies even when it lost favor in the community.
That Dialecticon site is a wonderful find, thanks. Color gets used 25% of times in Australia, flavor only 16%.
Twitter: delmerw
says:
We were going over things like color vs colour the other day at home; the Canadian arm of the family is here for the holidays and we were discussing some of the differences between school systems. (We decided the Canadians would kick butt when the metric system is discussed in math class.)