On Sun, 2 Mar 2003, Kenneth Whistler wrote: >> >> > Does anyone know of a Latin-based language in which it is possible to >> > have a lowercase immediately followed by an uppercase in the SAME word? > >In addition to the examples pointed out by Roozbeh and Michael, >this pattern is growing increasingly common in commercial English, >where such forms as "eBusiness" and "eSecurity" are enjoying >increasing vogue. And CamelCasing is apparent not only in >technical terminology, but has spread to company names and the >like, as well. Consider, e.g., "PayPal".
Thanks to everyone who responded. I must admit the last answer I expected to my question was "English". At least I feel confident now that I won't be creating a major diplomatic incident if I don't cater for all possible lowercase-to-uppercase kerning pairs. I've already allowed for the McGowans and O'Reillys so I think I'll leave it at that. As to the many examples given of words (really two words without a space) such as "PayPal", I've always called these "Macintosh Words" because I'm sure this practice was started many years ago by the people who wrote and named Mac applications, if not by Apple itself? Perhaps the philosophy here was that the space was just a waste of space, so to speak. On the other side of the fence are what I call "Windows Words" with not an uppercase in sight presumably first created by nerds with no time or inclination to use the Shift key eg "filename.doc". I also give these the more poetic name "eecummings words". The irony is that both Mac and Windows operating systems (written by those same nerds no doubt) are delightfully scornful of all this typographic preciousness on our part. If you have a file called "PayPal" and you try to create another file called "PAYPAL" or "paypal" or even "PaYpAL" both operating systems will put us firmly in our place with the response "That name is already taken, please use a different name". Sigh. Kevin
