capitalization - How Should Trademarks be Written?


I'm a moderator at another StackExchange site and a debate has come up about the usage of the trademarked name for which I site is about, i.e. WordPress. Note as a trademark it is spelled in CamelCase and thus we wanted our guidelines to be that you render it in CamelCase or we'll probably edit it so that it will be consistent (we don't expect that people will all notice this nor are we trying to get people to obey, we just want to let them know that we'd prefer they do it this way and if they don't we'll probably edit it for them as we are writing our answers.)


Of course there is always at least one person who takes issue when a group tries to create order partly in this case because of a dust-up created by the founder of WordPress who recently added a function to WordPress to CamelCase the name in content on people's sites and has dismissed the outcry about it from a group of passionate people as not his concern. Ignoring whether he should or should not have done that (I see these two issues as orthogonal) my view is that for our site if WordPress is cased as WordPress by its founder it makes our site appear more of an authority if we are generally consistent in that usage. But this one individual wants to debate that and part of his argument is as follows:



Spoken professionally, names should be written orthographically correct. Correct me if I'm wrong, but to my best knowledge in English (both BE and AE), this means with an uppercase first letter per each word -the rest lowercase.


I'm aware that companies can get very "creative" to break the "burdening" constraints of language for their own and their products names. But to make everything well read- and understandable, authors should first aim for an orthographically correct writing instead of fulfilling the marketing needs of a specific company.



So I'd like to know if it would be considered more proper in written English and why to use casing such as Mcdonalds, Powerpoint, Thinkpad, Jpmorgan, Ebay, L'oreal, Conocophillips, Unitedhealth, Wellpoint, Pepsico, and Fedex OR the casing that follows their trademarks; i.e. McDonalds, PowerPoint, ThinkPad, JPMorgan, eBay, L'Oreal, ConocoPhillips, UnitedHealth, WellPoint, PepsiCo, and FedEx and relatedly would be be easier to read/more understandable? Note his last statement seems to imply he is really just trying to use this his statement on the "proper" way to do it in English (which is ironic as he's a non-native speaker) in order to justify his apparent desire to be "anti-marketing."


So I am coming here hoping for support that CamelCase for trademarks is the correct form in English usage but will be open minded in hearing your opinions and might even change my mind as I often do when presented with better evidence.



Answer



There are so many exceptions. Names don't always get caps all the way through, e.g. "Osama bin Laden", "Giancarlo di Donato", "Martin van Buren". "L'Hôpital's rule". We respect the capitalization of people's names based on the way that they write them, so how is this any different?


Furthermore, on whose authority does he consider this rule orthographically "correct"? All newspapers write brand names like iPhone and not Iphone. Is it really easier to read words if I see them written one way in every professional publication, commercial, and product labeling, and then another way when a random website writes about it?


Clearly, someone is just annoyed at the ways that companies capitalize things nowadays. Sure, it wasn't popular in the past, but in the past we basically didn't have acronyms either (for example). There are always new innovations taking place in language and orthography. So, there is no basis in this being objectively "correct", nor does popular usage dictate that this person's rule is reflective of actual usage.


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