Re: Help! Need official support for non-standard capitalization

["Sandy Harris" <sharris -at- dkl -dot- com>]

anne -at- visi -dot- com wrote:
> 
> I need some help to challenge the status quo on the capitalization of
> a company name.
> 
> I just started a job with e.Thingummy, Inc.  (Note: names have been
> changed to protect the innocent...)
> 
> However, in marketing materials and white papers, the current PR firm
> uses "E.Thingummy" when the company name starts a sentence.
> 
> I'm concerned about the confusion factor of this capitalization shift,
> but was told that this capitalization conforms to the New York Times'
> standards.
> 
> Can anyone help provide a reference to any respected standard-setting
> body that might allow the preservation of an initial lower-case letter
> in a company name?

The jargon file is a collection of hacker (in the original positive
sense) slang and folklore that has been published as a book at least
twice. Originally "The Hacker's Dictionary", edited by Steele who's
been a prof at Carnegie Mellon, co-author of a standard C language
reference, ... More recently "The New Hacker's Dictionary", edited
by Eric Raymond who's probably the best known spokesman for Open
source. See www.opensource.org and especially his "The Cathedral and
the Bazaar" essay.

The jargon file is at:

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/

It discusses this issue at:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/Hacker-Writing-Style.html

although it is talking about sentences like "x is assigned the value 3"
or "cd to your home directory" where changing case in the variable
name or command name would be dumb.