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Former colleague of mine, a technology reporter at Computerworld, got a letter from a company about 15 years ago demanding that he not use the term "thumb drive
by ilamont 4y ago
Former colleague of mine, a technology reporter at Computerworld, got a letter from a company about 15 years ago demanding that he not use the term "thumb drive" in his articles unless it was referring to their product. It was a generic term by then, although they may have been trying to trademark it. He basically said "F that" and we continued to use "thumb drive."
In the late 90s and early 00s we sometimes got requests from PR companies working for big tech demanding that we use certain spelling for product names. Two examples that spring to mind are "Yahoo!" and "Windows Me" ... in the later case, we had been using "Windows Millennium Edition" or "Windows ME" and the PR people did not like that.
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y agoThese are really obnoxious examples as they violate the rules of the language that exist for a reason. If you use an exclamation mark, you want to attract the attention of the reader to something for a reason. Similarly, there are rules for creating initialisms and acronyms and random capitalization changes are not part of them.