More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
telereaD editor goes into sTaTE of RebeLLiOn
November 22, 2009 | 11:58 pm
|
By Paul Biba
Paul Biba, Co-Editor of TeleRead, announced today that he has entered into a state of rebellion against PR firms and their rampant capitalization, or non-capitalization, of letters in names. In a discussion with Dan Bloom, based in Taiwan, as to whether to capitalize the B&N Nook, or type it as nook, Biba said:
For me – I’m in a state of rebellion against all these idiot PR firms who come up with non-capital letter names or bastardize the language by capitalizing in the middle of names. Two of the worst examples are “nook” and “eDGe”.
I rebel for three reasons. First, it’s damn hard to type this stuff and I resent being put through a typing test whenever I want to report on an item. Second, as far as not capitalizing the initial letter, as in “nook”, it makes it very hard for the reader to figure out what’s going on in a sentence without the capital. And third, by not capitalizing the name it looks to most readers that I’m a sloppy typist and have made a typo, especially if it’s the first word in a sentence, and this is not acceptable to me.
So the bottom line is screw the PR people and I’m going to capitalize Nook and type eDGe as Edge. Tough!
According to reliable sources, Biba was about to post this on TeleRead in all capital letters, but came to his senses before it was too late.
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
Well said, Paul. I am glad you didn’t put it all in capital letters, because they it would sound like shouting. You said it best this way. Let’s see if barnes and noble pr dept has any response? Carolyn Brow, the corporate communications PR maven there, told me in email just seconds ago in Internet time, when I asked her how I should type out the word nook, lowercase or uppercase, and with a the before it or alone, and she said:
“It is all lowercase nook and just nook not the nook.”
I think that settles it. Sort of. For now. My guess is that the NY Times copydesk will continue to cap the word, as brad stone did the other day, and my guess is also that the AP and UPI will also cap it, as will reuters and afp and dpa and jta. cnn, too. BBC, too.
Yahoo! never made the ! stick, so maybe “nook” will never stick either. I applaud creative naming and creative PR, but your post above says it well and says it all. It should be copied all over the Internet and pasted on every nook and cranny worldwide. Enough already! A rose is a rose is a rose.
well, there go my plans to get a nook and put e. e. cummings on it.
Hmmm, so Paul will also hate my epubBooks.com branding?
Well, in my defence I have a very good reason, which I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as I figure it out
I don’t see a problem with these things having “official” branding, aren’t we going through the same problems with ePub (EPUB, ePUB, etc.), just as long as we all use some common sense in our writing.
Guess I won’t be submitting that article on how GRiD and NeXT computers make great E-readers…
Chris, good humor there on the impossibility of getting e e cummings on your nook! humor helps. i just heard from second PR official at BN and she saud, Mary Ellen Keating, said: “it is nook, lowercase, not Nook, and no THE before nook. just nook.”
But i will bet you US$1 million dollars that most newspaper and blog editors will do the sensible thing and uppercase the first N in “nook” and they will also call it “the Nook”, like they call the Kindle the Kindle, and there’s no getting around common sense and common usage, despite what the BN PR department says. Then again, we all do write iPhone, not Iphone, not iphone, so if we can show respect to the iPhone, why can’t we show respect the BN’s nook? Because because because. SMILE.
btw, chris, most people are under the assumption that e. e. cummings spelled his name that way in lowercase form, i was also deluded, but if you do a google or wiki search, in turns out that in fact he preferred his real official US passsport census name E.E. Cummings, uppercased, and the lowercase myth of e e cummings is just that: a myth. A literary myth. I refused to believe it until i googled and wiki’d and yup, he was NEVER called e.e. cummings. we were had in our high school poetry classes! go look!
so there’s no hope for nook in all this.
I believe it should be Knook but they dropped the silent capital ‘K’.
I’m old school, and I’ve always felt proper names should be initial-capitalized… hence, Steve, Paul, Kindle, Nook, Apple, etc. I often type SteveJordanBooks.com, in order to make it easier for people to read it… but the browser doesn’t care where the capitals are (or aren’t), it’ll get you to the site either way.
If an organization wants to create logos and trademarks with goofy capitaliation, that is, of course, their prerogative. But practically speaking, our modern text communications aren’t the same globally, and the use of caps is purely optional for many. So they’re simply going to have to get used to initial caps, non-caps, all-caps, LongStringInitialCaps, and every variation thereof.
Paul: Type What You Want. We’re behind you.
I agree with all of you and I will spell it as I wish. I am bugged by people who think it is cute to type in all lower case and use text messaging abbreviations to the point that I stop reading them. Same with all caps. I had to read that stuff in the military and hope to never have to again. Now that life is optional instead of dictatorial, I can choose to just skip what I wish. Meantime, the Brits are making great fun of the word nook, as in nookie, as in let’s go down to the whore house and get us some nookie!
i agree with everyone here. but what about blackberry. steve, and others, do you cap the second b or lowercase it? teleread earlier stories capped the second b. so why show respect to the blackberry but not to the nook? above all else, we should be consistent. or inconsistent. either way. david will spell as he wishes. he’s right. it’s a Nook, not a nook. but let’s see what you all say about blackberry…..AL, in the old movies i liked reading those old telegrams in all caps stop see you soon stop etc etc….. like Steve, I am also Old School, note the caps, Steve….
I’m not too bothered by StudlyCaps (or kewl lowercasing) in general. For made-up words like “iPod” it’s not likely to cause confusion.
But for a word like “nook,” where the word already has meaning outside of its proper noun form, leaving off the capital letter simply causes reader confusion. If you write “I keep a lot of books in a nook in my room,” do you keep paper books in a cubbyhole, or do you keep e-books on an e-reader? (Bad enough that you’ll still get that confusion in verbal speech regardless, since there’s no way to capitalize a spoken word.
)
its kinda silly and oldfashioned, to disagree to this way of creative writing.
)
if McAfee sels million tools with this name and iMac and YouTube are involved in our society, why make such a fuzz?
To me Paul Biba is just old-fashioned and over aged
This is just epic. Thanks for putting this out there
oped ……7-reasons-to lowercase-”internet”-
http://www.thewrap.com/media/blog-post/7-reasons-lowercase-internet-28442