In Word Ways #5.2 (1972), Darryl Francis set aside some time to study “Internally Capitalized Words” like Tir na nOg, an Irish word for Heaven. With some difficulty, Francis listed twenty-six cases of such “internal capitalization,” which modern resources call “camel case,” visualizing the capital O in nOg as a camel-like “hump.”
(Art by Emoji One.)
Since 1972, camel case has sprouted up all over. The most common examples come from corporations or their products, whose promoters wanted their names to have distinctive character. See, for instance, YouTube, PowerPoint, HarperCollins, PricewaterhouseCoopers, FedEx, iPhone, iPad, iMac, eBay, MasterCard, and SportsCenter. Some of these brands have gotten so ubiquitous that we use them as verbs: YouTubing, FedExing, eBaying.
Other camel-case words and brands have their roots in the conventions of people’s last names, like LaGuardia (the airport) and MacGuffin or McGuffin (an object that drives the plot of a story).
The practice is common in chemical formulas like NaCl (table salt) and in programming, where it is often necessary to express multiple words as a single word. The first Web browser was literally known as “WorldWideWeb.”
For a while there, I was likely to encounter “sarcastic case,” best defined by the example below…
Meme culture works fast, and the idea that alternating caps cOnVeY sArCaSm might now be a dead fad. But it would probably still work as communication for those who remember it, and it’s a rare example of what creative cases can do.
(And hey, SpongeBob SquarePants is another example of camel case!)
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Another piece from that issue was “Sticks and Stones,” which dealt with the many dictionary terms rooted in offensive stereotypes, from “Dutch courage” to “welshing” to…a lot of terms I’d feel more and more uncomfortable producing here. Ralph Beaman put out a call for action: “The aforementioned words are all in Webster’s Unabridged Third Edition. We have thrown down the gauntlet. Logologists—what will you do about it?”
I’m not sure logologists ended up doing all that much, but society has moved on this issue in the last 52 years. Though many of the terms Beaman cited are familiar to me, most are far more distant memories than the SpongeBob meme above.
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The issue featured a few very concise “spoonerism poems” that I thought I’d just reproduce here. All but the last are by Mary J. Youngquist, the last is by Dave Silverman.
Lo, night—
No light.
Me soon
See moon.
Many eat
Any meat,
Grilled cheese,
Chilled grease.
Science,
I sense,
May find
Fey mind.
Ill wit.
Will it
Die out?
I doubt.
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Congratulations are in order to Olganny for pulling off this wild Cine2Nerdle yesterday. The puzzle required using sixteen unique letters to spell four movies, and one (and only one) letter from each movie had to come together to spell a fifth. I tried to construct a similar idea, and I can tell you, it's much harder than it looks!
Next: The story of crosswords’ first official full year!