WHAT鈥橲 with the outbreak of bumpy words 鈥� or should that be BumpyWords? Do BlackBerry, MySpace, YouTube and LinkedIn signal an attack on the English language?
Don鈥檛 panic. They鈥檙e examples of CamelCase (or medial capitals, BiCapitalisation, CapWords and InterCaps) and they鈥檙e all about forming compound words by capitalising each chunk to preserve its identity. This produces 鈥渃amel鈥� words with a range of 鈥渉umps鈥�.
CamelCase has been around since the 1950s in a few brand names, such as CinemaScope. But it was software engineers who really took CamelCase to their hearts, using it in their program-writing conventions, and developing two separate styles: UpperCamelCase (UCC) and lowerCamelCase (lCC).
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It鈥檚 not hard to see why. If you have to wade through lines and lines of programs day in, day out, it helps to be able to tell the difference between structural elements, functions, procedures and objects provided by the language, and the names of things that programmers have declared and defined themselves. If it鈥檚 defined by a programmer, you can鈥檛 look it up in the manual; you have to find it in the program to work out what it does.
As soon as computer keyboards were revolutionised in the late 1960s to include upper and lower-case characters, happy programmers were suddenly able to make distinctions. For example, while 鈥渟witch鈥� is a programming-language element, 鈥渟witchAddressFields鈥� would be defined by the programmer. The latter is virtually unreadable when presented all in lower case (switchaddressfields).
CamelCase has now made it to the everyday world of techie products and web services, but will it go totally mainstream? Very possibly.
In the internet age, CamelCase seems to be surging because it鈥檚 not possible to put spaces into web addresses. Many companies feel obliged to compress their names into (www.)OneBlockOfText(.com) to preserve brand identity across all formats and media. And consider PricewaterhouseCoopers (note the combination of lCC and UCC) and GlaxoSmithKline.
Marketing directors at Corel, whose products include WordPerfect, say CamelCase boosts readability. Not only that, CamelCase brand names are easily turned into catchy typographic icons and are also easier to trademark, even if made up of words which may be tricky to trademark individually.
鈥淐ompanies compress their names into OneBlockOfText鈥�
Should linguistic purists be affronted by this corporate styling? Jim Wallace, president of the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature (SPELL), is sanguine. 鈥淭he use of such new names in daily commerce is no serious threat to the language. We see no reason to shun them,鈥� he says.
We wait with more than a little trepidation the break-out of a rival convention used by programmers: underscore_delimited_names.