Photo by CoolCeasar via Wikimedia Commons |
There was an article in last Sunday’s New York Times about a
huge online repository of scientific papers called arXiv, pronounced “archive.” I know I ought to be impressed by the size and scope of this amazing
resource, but in truth my first and lasting reaction is annoyance…at the
spelling: small “a” to start, followed by small "r," and then an upper-case X in the middle, which is
supposed to be pronounced like a K. What marketing wizard came up with that?
I should concede right now that I’m making this complaint
thirty-odd years too late. I think the blame for the upper-case-in-the-middle
phenomenon (also known as "CamelCase") dates back to 1979 when Master Charge rebranded itself MasterCard.
Another decade passed before a merger of publishers gave us HarperCollins. Four years later, Federal Express officially turned itself into FedEx. Now
there’s ExxonMobil, OnStar, PayPal, PetSmart, CareFirst, and YouTube, to rattle off
just the first half-dozen that come to mind.
Since the practice has been around for so long, you might
think I would be used to it by now, and I suppose I should be; but I confess I
find it just as annoying in 2012 to type HarperCollins –one word with a “medial
cap”—as I did when I typed that company name for the very first time. I felt, and
still feel, this overpowering urge to hit the space bar before hitting the
shift key to type that capital “C.” My annoyance before the upper case letter is amplified if I
have to begin typing the brand name with a lower case initial -- as in “eBay”
or “iPad.”
I think it’s safe to assume that this feeling of irritation
is a conditioned response seldom evoked in someone who grew up using these
product and seeing these spellings from childhood on. If you are young enough to
be in this category, you probably never capitalize anything if you can avoid
it. So you fiddle with your ipad, or better still, ur ipad and i dont
need to mention how much faster u can text when u do it this way. (It speeds
things up to omit all the punctuation, too.)
That’s not all that can make a brand name bad to type. Throw in a number, and it’s so much worse. Take Car2Go, the new
car-sharing service in DC. Not only does it have the middle-of-the-brand-name
upper-case letter, and a numeral used in the name in place of the word “to,”
but there’s the final indignity: inconsistent usage. On the company’s
website in other cities it appears in a variety of forms: Car2Go, Car2go,
car2go, and CAR2GO.
Which brings me to the one brand name that I think wins
hands-down for the most annoying way to write its own name. And the winner is
(drumroll with an Allen wrench): IKEA – a company that styles itself in
all caps, although it’s not an acronym for anything related to furniture or
home décor. (Curious about those four letters? You can find out what IKEA
stands for here: (http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/about_ikea/the_ikea_way/history/1940_1950.html).
People also commonly write it Ikea. I’m dreading the day (who knows
when this will happen?) when they decide to remake themselves as a high-tech
logo and become iKeA…or ikeA, or, who knows, maybe iK3a.
I hope I didn’t just give IKEA’s marketing department the
ID3A!
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