The Curious Case of the Camel

The case of the camel is no mystery, it is actually just a writing style that uses a different variation of the standard upper and lower case orthographic mix.

CamelCase is the method of writing compound words or phrases by starting each individual word with an upper case letter and not using spacing between the individual words - which results in a word that looks like a camel with humps.

This style is popular in branding and can be recognized in many corporate names, including: MasterCard, BlackBerry, RadioShack, YouTube, and MySpace.

By the way, the CamelCase orthographic method has some other fun and descriptive names too - BumpyCaps, BumpyCase, CamelBack, CamelCaps, HumpBack, and NerdCaps to name a few (a double-few to be semantically accurate).

Thank you JD (Engine Room) for calling my attention to this fun word.

Cursive Writing (Penmanship) and Grammatology

The February 23rd issue of Newsweek magazine contained an article by Jessica Bennett titled, "The Curse of Cursive." The article gives a brief history of penmanship and points out that, because of technology, the use of penmanship has been steadily decreasing over the years. While Bennett covers the pros and cons of the loss of penmanship, she makes it clear that she is all for "eras(ing) it for good."

Cursive writing is a system of writing and therefore falls under the science of grammatology which, as discussed yesterday, is the scientific study of writing systems.

I find cursive to be both beautiful and elegant and I think it would be a shame to lose this writing system. What do you grammatologists out there think? Please submit your comments.