Hacker News Reader

Comment by andix | Hacker News Reader

Because it's the correct way to spell it. Names are spelled with an uppercase letter in the beginning and all the other letters are lowercase. "I saw John" vs. "I saw john" vs. "I saw JOHN". First one is correct. Even if John tells you "My name is spelled with a lower case j". Or if John writes: "this orange thing is a kaRROT", it's still a carrot.

You can write whatever you want. You can also write "Tis is me bunni and he likes KArRoTs" and have a lot of friends agree with you that's the correct spelling. And it is still generally considered wrong :)

View on HN

There are many names that do not follow your rule, and generally speaking I'd find it very rude if I told you my name, and you'd go "let me fix that to the _correct_ spelling". For example a name as Angus MacGyver, or Armand de la Cour. Both don't follow your rule. I don't see why that wouldn't apply to brand names as well.

Counter examples: “iPhone”, “eBay”, or people like Norm deSilva [1].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_deSilva

Do people actually write eBay? It looks as dated as eMail.

iPhone is definitely an example of marketing winning over grammar, but it's not a given. Plenty of style guides indicate "our company name is to be written in all caps", when they want to stand out, which the rest of us happily ignore.

Names should be written as they were created, grammar regarding them only comes into question in case of suffixes or the like.

I can mostly agree with people's names, especially stuff like cultural variations or things that are basically name prepositions like de/Mac/o etc. That said if you decided to change your name to "JOHN SMITH" don't be surprised if that decision was less respected and you were referred to as "John Smith" following capitalisation norms.

Companies don't get even that assumption for me, sure I'll use "iPhone" because they've won that one and it's the cultural expectation, but the only time I'm using "FREE NOW" is to criticise that decision

Maybe. Probably. But in practice no one really cares other than editors and pedants. I'd probably only bother if I was showcasing something to people from that particular entity.

>Do people actually write eBay?

Yes?

In my experience, publications and the like do tend to respect the capitalization and other choices of a company/project/etc. with perhaps some exceptions like the ! in Yahoo! and perhaps all caps as in NVIDIA. In the case of Wikipedia, I'd go so far as to say that they're simply wrong if they're ignoring the actual way a company name is officially styled.

Mind you, I'm not necessarily a big fan of case-sensitive everything but here we are.

You'll see me even write e-mail!

Wikipedia often rejects corporate case styling and uses the sane "first letter upper case, others lowercase" for some brands. For example Wikipedia writes Nvidia instead of NVIDIA, although the company always capitalizes its name without exception.

Relevant Manual of Style entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...

Quite arbitrary. They disallow all caps ASUS and NVIDIA, but allow all-lowercase xkcd, because I guess xkcd is "ours" while big corps are the "Other".

Not sure. There's GNU after all. Wikipedia's "arbitrary" standard is actually pretty common in my experience. But I'm not sure I could come up with a coherent explanation as to why.

GNU is an acronym, that's fine. But if they insist on Nvidia, they should also insist on Xkcd (it's not an acronym, just an unpronounceable artificial word).

And radar is an acronym too and it's not commonly capitalized although SCSI is. And, often, Fortran, not FORTRAN. I'm not making a case for how things should be. I'm just observing how they commonly are in style guides, etc.

I think part of it is a general stylistic distaste for having "unnecessary" caps. See also general shift away from "Open Source," "Big Data," and the like.

That is not true.

> Follow standard English text formatting and capitalization practices, even if the trademark owner considers nonstandard formatting "official", as long as this is a style already in widespread use, rather than inventing a new one: (But see exception below under § Trademarks that begin with a lowercase letter.)

> use: Time, Kiss, Asus, Sony Mobile. (Capitalize IKEA, IBM, as acronyms/initialisms.)

> avoid: TIME, KISS, ASUS, SONY Mobile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...

No, Wikipedia does not make the judgement call on whether to "reject" corporate case styling on its own, it follows what is "in widespread use":

> use: Time, Kiss, Asus, Sony Mobile. (Capitalize IKEA, IBM, as acronyms/initialisms.)

> avoid: TIME, KISS, ASUS, SONY Mobile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...

One thing that entry does not cover is all lower-case names. Although a couple things I looked up (gnuplot, xkcd), Wikipedia does seen to respect all lower-case. I'm not sure how many companies actually have all lower-case names--even if their logo is all lower-case. And my observation is that even many projects that are nominally lower-case, aren't very consistent about it as in the current example.

Not all names:

danah boyd - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danah_boyd

brian d foy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_d_foy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_lower_case...

People are perfectly free to spell their names however they want. Good luck to them in getting everyone else to spell them that way, though. And even more so, good luck not having other people think they're being pretentious wankers.

And even in cases where the lowercase starting letter is somewhat accepted, the start of the sentence rule is still left untouched by most writers. Iphones come to mind.

How do you spell iPhone when starting a sentence?

>Iphone is a phone made by Apple

In my native language, the general advice from our language council is to NOT listen to corporation’s rules. You would write “an iphone”, and casing as usual. In fact you wouldn’t really use iphone at all, but smartphone. The idea is that the name casing rules are for showing respect, and an inanimate product does not deserve the same respect as a person.

OTOH you would say Apple though, but I guess that avoids some obvious ambiguity

> In fact you wouldn’t really use iphone at all, but smartphone

The sentence "Smartphone is a phone made by Apple" (or maybe "A smartphone is a phone made by Apple") would have a very different and wrong meaning though, so that doesn't make much sense to me.

I don't know what your native language is, could it be Swedish? In Sweden, media consistently write Iphone, because it's a name, and names start with upper case.

As you mentioned, what the marketing department says about the case of letters in the name does not affect this generic recommendation.

Of course, you'll find a lot of people writing it in accordance with the marketing style, bit typically you'll see media follow the Swedish spelling rules.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com