9 ms·

Great read. Somewhat of an off-topic question, but here goes: > Watkins wanted her pen name to be spelled in lowercase to shift the attention from her identity

Great read. Somewhat of an off-topic question, but here goes: > Watkins wanted her pen name to be spelled in lowercase to shift the attention from her identity to her ideas. I’m sure what I’m about to say has been discussed before — but wouldn’t this accomplish the opposite effect? I feel her “unconventional” name makes me focus more on it, not less (especially when her name is used at the beginning of a sentence, where we are trained to expect a capital letter no matter what). Do other people with lowercase names have similar justifications?

Luc 8y ago
Sounds like it worked as intended?
- oceliker 8y ago
  Isn't it the exact opposite actually? (Sorry if I'm missing sarcasm) Here I am discussing how her name is spelled, instead of her actual ideas in the field...
  - Luc 8y ago
    No sarcasm. You're wondering why she spelled her name like this, right? That was her intention, wasn't it?
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
So, naivety or narcissism?
gumby 8y ago
I have felt the same way so was interested to see that in the article. Thanks for pointing it out.
williamdclt 8y ago
I tend to agree with you. The sardonic me would say that it's dumb of her. The cynical me would say that it's a marketing gimmick. The trusting me would say that what she meant was that she wanted to show that what's important is the idea rather than the identity
duado 8y ago
I just don’t think that third parties like newspapers should use these kinds of stylings any more than they should allow someone to specify that their name must always be printed in Times New Roman. The headline is super confusing because of this affectation — it seems like you know, a hook that you hang a bell from.
- kemitche 8y ago
  And they apply it inconsistently. "bell hooks" and "iPhone" get their desired capitalization, but "reddit" always came out as "Reddit" (or, sometimes, "Reddit, stylized as 'reddit'"), despite any wishes/requests to just use "reddit."
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    As far as I'm aware, the proper name of the site was always "Reddit". The logo graphic stylizes it as "reddit", and e.g. Wikipedia points that out for clarity, but official communications use the capital letter.
    - XMPPwocky 8y ago
      I think https://www.reddit.com/user/kemitche https://www.reddit.com/user/kemitche might be a bit more familiar with the official rEDDit style, to be fair.
      - 1123581321 8y ago
        PhasmaFelis appears to be correct, though. Wikipedia says it’s officially Reddit, and Paul Graham always refers to it as Reddit in old writing. Were you thinking of another source? I understand that you’ve linked to a former staff member’s reddit account, but it just looks like staff members wanted Reddit to be referred to as “reddit” even though that wasn’t the official capitalization of the name.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  I do think that people have the right to decide how their name is spelled. If they choose a name that you think is silly or confusing, you have every right to say so, but don't blame the publication for respecting their wishes.
pjc50 8y ago
To me it's a small pattern breaking annoyance, like a linter warning I can't turn off that triggers every time I see it.
mrob 8y ago
It's a clickbait name. I opened the article because I thought it was something about telephones. Just a person's name, with no information about their accomplishments, isn't enough to make me click. If it said "In praise of writer Bell Hooks" I might have read the article, but now I'm mostly annoyed at being tricked.
- GavinMcG 8y ago
  "Bell Hooks" was literally her great-grandmother's name. It's really what someone was called. No one set out to deceive you.
  - mrob 8y ago
    If the title was "In Praise of Bell Hooks" then I would still have mistakenly thought it was something about telephones, but it would have been 100% my mistake, and I would not have been annoyed. It's specifically the non-standard lowercase that is misleading and annoying. Proper nouns are conventionally capitalized, so if one is not capitalized then it's suggesting it's not a proper noun. Non-standard capitalization causes confusion, and I don't think it should be used. This isn't specific to people, e.g. I don't think you should call Adidas "adidas", or Sony "SONY", even if they claim that's the correct way to write it.
    - failrate 8y ago
      Do you have the same opinion about e. e. cummings?
      - mrob 8y ago
        Yes. Even somebody I respect as much as RMS I won't call "rms". The only exception I would make is for accounts/usernames, which are IMO primarily intended to be machine readable. If I say "rms" I mean "the person currently posting from the relevant rms account", not "the person called Richard Stallman". If you reject the conventions of English, then you are writing in your own private language, and you should expect people to transliterate it into English. This is standard practice for non-English writing systems. E.g. The Prime Minister of Japan is Shinzo Abe. This is making three changes from 安倍晋三. The writing system is changed to English. The personal name and the family name are swapped. The long vowel of 三 is ignored (if you are willing to use diacritics you could write it as ō, but this is not a standard English letter, so there is nothing wrong with omitting it). This is far bigger change than just using English capitalization.
dvtrn 8y ago
Interesting you bring this up because even as someone who has passively read bell hooks and been familiar with her work (not intimately so but by proxy), it was through this article that I learned for the first time that the de-capitalization of her pen-name was a conscious choice, and even thought both titles-here and on the NYT-site had committed an interesting grammatical mistake not capitalizing a proper noun.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  > an interesting grammatical mistake not capitalizing Previously done: e e cummings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jfk13 8y ago
> wouldn’t this accomplish the opposite effect? Yes. It's an affectation. To suggest that it's "to shift the attention from her identity to her ideas" is either incredibly naïve or simply dishonest. Deliberately breaking the established conventions of English writing in such a visible way is sure to draw attention to the name/identity, not shift it away.
- toomanyrichies 8y ago
  I’m confused by the downvotes here. I tend to agree with the above point, and while I’m open to having my mind changed, I have yet to see a convincing rebuttal to it. At the very least, it stands to reason that discussions and threads like this one would not exist if she capitalized her pen name. So the most charitable statement I can think of is that she genuinely did believe her actions would deflect attention from herself, but that they actually had the opposite effect. A more cynical statement is that she felt that a) her ideas wouldn’t attract enough attention on their own, and b) she needed a gimmick of some sort in order to stand out from the crowd. Few things annoy me more than people who try to stand out for the sake of attention, so I’m choosing to believe the more charitable scenario.

Luc 8y ago

Sounds like it worked as intended?

oceliker 8y ago
Isn't it the exact opposite actually? (Sorry if I'm missing sarcasm) Here I am discussing how her name is spelled, instead of her actual ideas in the field...
- Luc 8y ago
  No sarcasm. You're wondering why she spelled her name like this, right? That was her intention, wasn't it?

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

So, naivety or narcissism?

gumby 8y ago

I have felt the same way so was interested to see that in the article. Thanks for pointing it out.

williamdclt 8y ago

I tend to agree with you. The sardonic me would say that it's dumb of her. The cynical me would say that it's a marketing gimmick. The trusting me would say that what she meant was that she wanted to show that what's important is the idea rather than the identity

duado 8y ago

I just don’t think that third parties like newspapers should use these kinds of stylings any more than they should allow someone to specify that their name must always be printed in Times New Roman. The headline is super confusing because of this affectation — it seems like you know, a hook that you hang a bell from.

kemitche 8y ago
And they apply it inconsistently. "bell hooks" and "iPhone" get their desired capitalization, but "reddit" always came out as "Reddit" (or, sometimes, "Reddit, stylized as 'reddit'"), despite any wishes/requests to just use "reddit."
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  As far as I'm aware, the proper name of the site was always "Reddit". The logo graphic stylizes it as "reddit", and e.g. Wikipedia points that out for clarity, but official communications use the capital letter.
  - XMPPwocky 8y ago
    I think https://www.reddit.com/user/kemitche https://www.reddit.com/user/kemitche might be a bit more familiar with the official rEDDit style, to be fair.
    - 1123581321 8y ago
      PhasmaFelis appears to be correct, though. Wikipedia says it’s officially Reddit, and Paul Graham always refers to it as Reddit in old writing. Were you thinking of another source? I understand that you’ve linked to a former staff member’s reddit account, but it just looks like staff members wanted Reddit to be referred to as “reddit” even though that wasn’t the official capitalization of the name.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
I do think that people have the right to decide how their name is spelled. If they choose a name that you think is silly or confusing, you have every right to say so, but don't blame the publication for respecting their wishes.

pjc50 8y ago

To me it's a small pattern breaking annoyance, like a linter warning I can't turn off that triggers every time I see it.

mrob 8y ago

It's a clickbait name. I opened the article because I thought it was something about telephones. Just a person's name, with no information about their accomplishments, isn't enough to make me click. If it said "In praise of writer Bell Hooks" I might have read the article, but now I'm mostly annoyed at being tricked.

GavinMcG 8y ago
"Bell Hooks" was literally her great-grandmother's name. It's really what someone was called. No one set out to deceive you.
- mrob 8y ago
  If the title was "In Praise of Bell Hooks" then I would still have mistakenly thought it was something about telephones, but it would have been 100% my mistake, and I would not have been annoyed. It's specifically the non-standard lowercase that is misleading and annoying. Proper nouns are conventionally capitalized, so if one is not capitalized then it's suggesting it's not a proper noun. Non-standard capitalization causes confusion, and I don't think it should be used. This isn't specific to people, e.g. I don't think you should call Adidas "adidas", or Sony "SONY", even if they claim that's the correct way to write it.
  - failrate 8y ago
    Do you have the same opinion about e. e. cummings?
    - mrob 8y ago
      Yes. Even somebody I respect as much as RMS I won't call "rms". The only exception I would make is for accounts/usernames, which are IMO primarily intended to be machine readable. If I say "rms" I mean "the person currently posting from the relevant rms account", not "the person called Richard Stallman". If you reject the conventions of English, then you are writing in your own private language, and you should expect people to transliterate it into English. This is standard practice for non-English writing systems. E.g. The Prime Minister of Japan is Shinzo Abe. This is making three changes from 安倍晋三. The writing system is changed to English. The personal name and the family name are swapped. The long vowel of 三 is ignored (if you are willing to use diacritics you could write it as ō, but this is not a standard English letter, so there is nothing wrong with omitting it). This is far bigger change than just using English capitalization.

dvtrn 8y ago

Interesting you bring this up because even as someone who has passively read bell hooks and been familiar with her work (not intimately so but by proxy), it was through this article that I learned for the first time that the de-capitalization of her pen-name was a conscious choice, and even thought both titles-here and on the NYT-site had committed an interesting grammatical mistake not capitalizing a proper noun.

B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
> an interesting grammatical mistake not capitalizing Previously done: e e cummings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jfk13 8y ago

> wouldn’t this accomplish the opposite effect? Yes. It's an affectation. To suggest that it's "to shift the attention from her identity to her ideas" is either incredibly naïve or simply dishonest. Deliberately breaking the established conventions of English writing in such a visible way is sure to draw attention to the name/identity, not shift it away.

toomanyrichies 8y ago
I’m confused by the downvotes here. I tend to agree with the above point, and while I’m open to having my mind changed, I have yet to see a convincing rebuttal to it. At the very least, it stands to reason that discussions and threads like this one would not exist if she capitalized her pen name. So the most charitable statement I can think of is that she genuinely did believe her actions would deflect attention from herself, but that they actually had the opposite effect. A more cynical statement is that she felt that a) her ideas wouldn’t attract enough attention on their own, and b) she needed a gimmick of some sort in order to stand out from the crowd. Few things annoy me more than people who try to stand out for the sake of attention, so I’m choosing to believe the more charitable scenario.