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Counter 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_deS
by thih9 6y ago
Counter 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.
- guenthert 6y agoYou'll see me even write e-mail!
- bonoboTP 6y agoWikipedia often rejects corporate case styling and uses the sane "first letter upper case, others lowercase" for some brands. For example Wikipedia writes Nvidia instead of NVIDIA, although the company always capitalizes its name without exception.
- EE84M3i 6y agoRelevant Manual of Style entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trademarks#General_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...
- bonoboTP 6y agoQuite arbitrary. They disallow all caps ASUS and NVIDIA, but allow all-lowercase xkcd, because I guess xkcd is "ours" while big corps are the "Other".
- ghaff 6y agoNot sure. There's GNU after all. Wikipedia's "arbitrary" standard is actually pretty common in my experience. But I'm not sure I could come up with a coherent explanation as to why.
- bonoboTP 6y agoGNU is an acronym, that's fine. But if they insist on Nvidia, they should also insist on Xkcd (it's not an acronym, just an unpronounceable artificial word).
- ghaff 6y agoAnd radar is an acronym too and it's not commonly capitalized although SCSI is. And, often, Fortran, not FORTRAN. I'm not making a case for how things should be. I'm just observing how they commonly are in style guides, etc. I think part of it is a general stylistic distaste for having "unnecessary" caps. See also general shift away from "Open Source," "Big Data," and the like.