4 ms·
Because it's the correct way to spell it. Names are spelled with an uppercase letter in the beginning and all the other letters are lowercase. "I saw John" vs.
by andix 6y ago
Because it's the correct way to spell it. Names are spelled with an uppercase letter in the beginning and all the other letters are lowercase. "I saw John" vs. "I saw john" vs. "I saw JOHN". First one is correct. Even if John tells you "My name is spelled with a lower case j". Or if John writes: "this orange thing is a kaRROT", it's still a carrot.
You can write whatever you want. You can also write "Tis is me bunni and he likes KArRoTs" and have a lot of friends agree with you that's the correct spelling. And it is still generally considered wrong :)
- usrusr 6y agoAnd even in cases where the lowercase starting letter is somewhat accepted, the start of the sentence rule is still left untouched by most writers. Iphones come to mind.
- NullPrefix 6y agoHow do you spell iPhone when starting a sentence? >Iphone is a phone made by Apple
- toxik 6y agoIn my native language, the general advice from our language council is to NOT listen to corporation’s rules. You would write “an iphone”, and casing as usual. In fact you wouldn’t really use iphone at all, but smartphone. The idea is that the name casing rules are for showing respect, and an inanimate product does not deserve the same respect as a person. OTOH you would say Apple though, but I guess that avoids some obvious ambiguity
- yatac42 6y ago> In fact you wouldn’t really use iphone at all, but smartphone The sentence "Smartphone is a phone made by Apple" (or maybe "A smartphone is a phone made by Apple") would have a very different and wrong meaning though, so that doesn't make much sense to me.
- lokedhs 6y agoI don't know what your native language is, could it be Swedish? In Sweden, media consistently write Iphone, because it's a name, and names start with upper case. As you mentioned, what the marketing department says about the case of letters in the name does not affect this generic recommendation. Of course, you'll find a lot of people writing it in accordance with the marketing style, bit typically you'll see media follow the Swedish spelling rules.
- thih9 6y agoCounter examples: “iPhone”, “eBay”, or people like Norm deSilva [1]. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_deSilva https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_deSilva
- Macha 6y agoDo people actually write eBay? It looks as dated as eMail. iPhone is definitely an example of marketing winning over grammar, but it's not a given. Plenty of style guides indicate "our company name is to be written in all caps", when they want to stand out, which the rest of us happily ignore.
- kaba0 6y agoNames should be written as they were created, grammar regarding them only comes into question in case of suffixes or the like.
- Macha 6y agoI can mostly agree with people's names, especially stuff like cultural variations or things that are basically name prepositions like de/Mac/o etc. That said if you decided to change your name to "JOHN SMITH" don't be surprised if that decision was less respected and you were referred to as "John Smith" following capitalisation norms. Companies don't get even that assumption for me, sure I'll use "iPhone" because they've won that one and it's the cultural expectation, but the only time I'm using "FREE NOW" is to criticise that decision
- stjohnswarts 6y agoMaybe. Probably. But in practice no one really cares other than editors and pedants. I'd probably only bother if I was showcasing something to people from that particular entity.
- ghaff 6y ago>Do people actually write eBay? Yes? In my experience, publications and the like do tend to respect the capitalization and other choices of a company/project/etc. with perhaps some exceptions like the ! in Yahoo! and perhaps all caps as in NVIDIA. In the case of Wikipedia, I'd go so far as to say that they're simply wrong if they're ignoring the actual way a company name is officially styled. Mind you, I'm not necessarily a big fan of case-sensitive everything but here we are.
- Koenvh 6y agoThere are many names that do not follow your rule, and generally speaking I'd find it very rude if I told you my name, and you'd go "let me fix that to the _correct_ spelling". For example a name as Angus MacGyver, or Armand de la Cour. Both don't follow your rule. I don't see why that wouldn't apply to brand names as well.
- stordoff 6y agoNot all names: danah boyd - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danah_boyd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danah_boyd brian d foy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_d_foy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_d_foy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_lower_case_names_and_pseudonyms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_lower_case...
- CRConrad 6y agoPeople are perfectly free to spell their names however they want. Good luck to them in getting everyone else to spell them that way, though. And even more so, good luck not having other people think they're being pretentious wankers.