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[In the New York Times] Thereafter every brand name was permitted up to three idiosyncratic majuscules. Um, what? It's a brand name. Either you render it cor

[In the New York Times] Thereafter every brand name was permitted up to three idiosyncratic majuscules. Um, what? It's a brand name. Either you render it correctly, or you don't; there are no typographic decisions to be made unless you're committed to mangling it in the first place, right?

goodside 17y ago
I more or less follow this rule. I'll mention iPhone or TextMate without pause, but SpongeBob SquarePants is asking a bit much and (PRODUCT)RED, which is audacious enough to require a superscript, is just plain silly.
adatta02 17y ago
people always butcher the camelCasing on our company name. It's supposed to be Setfive but people will often write SetFive or Set Five. good thing the bank really doesn't care.
gojomo 17y ago
A decade ago, many journalistic outlets didn't humor brand-motivated capitalizations. They didn't accept the company's own marketing staff as authoritative about what was "correct" and what was "mangling". It was Ebay, not eBay; Next, not NeXT; Nationsbank not NationsBank; etc. This article is a lamentation that the journalistic style guardians didn't hold the line. Here's William Safire's 1997 take on the issue, alluded to by Crain but not linked: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/20/magazine/jammedtogether-names-inc.html http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/20/magazine/jammedtogether-na... I'm for camel case as a necessary evolution: there are so many similar names, and name collisions, that anything that lets someone try to be distinguishable, and anything that might make two words fit together more distinctively than if paired any otherway, deserves a chance.
etal 17y ago
A press release from a typical company will throw as much glitter on their own brand name as possible, and usually butcher the surrounding language a bit too: "the new FRISBEE [TM] brand Flying Disk..." If a writer takes this literally, a copy editor has to tone it down or else the brand name will dominate the article text and make it look like an ad, too: "It's a Frisbee." Fun variants include meaningless alternating caps, or a single lowercase 'i' inside an otherwise all-caps word. Newspapers want to use the brand name, not the logo or an ASCII attempt at one; and in decades past, fixing the caps helped comprehension rather than hurting it. They considered capitalization part of presentation, not content. (Shouldn't a brand name survive an all-caps typeface?)
- sp332 17y ago
  In the USA you can't use the brand name as a noun, or the owner risks losing legal control over the mark. Hence "FRISBEE [TM] brand Flying Disk."
  - etal 17y ago
    Only if it's used casually as a generic term. Keeping it uppercased proper noun (Frisbee) respects the trademark as far as the law is concerned, so that was the Associated Press guideline. Adding [TM] lets the owner emphasize that the trademark was applied for, (R) means it's fully registered, but neither symbol is required for mentioning the brand in print -- just simple capitalization is enough to respect the trademark.

goodside 17y ago

I more or less follow this rule. I'll mention iPhone or TextMate without pause, but SpongeBob SquarePants is asking a bit much and (PRODUCT)RED, which is audacious enough to require a superscript, is just plain silly.

adatta02 17y ago

people always butcher the camelCasing on our company name. It's supposed to be Setfive but people will often write SetFive or Set Five. good thing the bank really doesn't care.

gojomo 17y ago

A decade ago, many journalistic outlets didn't humor brand-motivated capitalizations. They didn't accept the company's own marketing staff as authoritative about what was "correct" and what was "mangling". It was Ebay, not eBay; Next, not NeXT; Nationsbank not NationsBank; etc. This article is a lamentation that the journalistic style guardians didn't hold the line. Here's William Safire's 1997 take on the issue, alluded to by Crain but not linked: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/20/magazine/jammedtogether-names-inc.html http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/20/magazine/jammedtogether-na... I'm for camel case as a necessary evolution: there are so many similar names, and name collisions, that anything that lets someone try to be distinguishable, and anything that might make two words fit together more distinctively than if paired any otherway, deserves a chance.

etal 17y ago

A press release from a typical company will throw as much glitter on their own brand name as possible, and usually butcher the surrounding language a bit too: "the new FRISBEE [TM] brand Flying Disk..." If a writer takes this literally, a copy editor has to tone it down or else the brand name will dominate the article text and make it look like an ad, too: "It's a Frisbee." Fun variants include meaningless alternating caps, or a single lowercase 'i' inside an otherwise all-caps word. Newspapers want to use the brand name, not the logo or an ASCII attempt at one; and in decades past, fixing the caps helped comprehension rather than hurting it. They considered capitalization part of presentation, not content. (Shouldn't a brand name survive an all-caps typeface?)

sp332 17y ago
In the USA you can't use the brand name as a noun, or the owner risks losing legal control over the mark. Hence "FRISBEE [TM] brand Flying Disk."
- etal 17y ago
  Only if it's used casually as a generic term. Keeping it uppercased proper noun (Frisbee) respects the trademark as far as the law is concerned, so that was the Associated Press guideline. Adding [TM] lets the owner emphasize that the trademark was applied for, (R) means it's fully registered, but neither symbol is required for mentioning the brand in print -- just simple capitalization is enough to respect the trademark.