Medial capitals have always been around in English, but the use has exploded of late, and a lot of people think it looks silly, as though a word is missing a sp

Medial capitals have always been around in English, but the use has exploded of late, and a lot of people think it looks silly, as though a word is missing a space or a letter is randomly miscased. It looks alright in personal names because we’re used to it—no one complains about MacDonald, DeLuca, LeBlanc, or O’Shaughnessy. But the phenomenon of medial capitals in company names is really only about 40 years old. There are many well-known examples—YouTube, PayPal, RadioShack, PlayStation, &c., but I think they succeed by sheer volume and dot-com kitsch. The only time it really bothers me is when budding authors are trying to come up with fantasy names. They use (what I lovingly call) Dread Intercapitals alongside Dread Apostrophes and Dread Accents to make names that look like Harâk’Thür—presumably in imitation of Tolkien, who actually knew what he was doing, and had internally consistent language models.