WHAT’S with the outbreak of bumpy words – or should that be BumpyWords? Do BlackBerry, MySpace, YouTube and LinkedIn signal an attack on the English language?
Don’t panic. They’re examples of CamelCase (or medial capitals, BiCapitalisation, CapWords and InterCaps) and they’re all about forming compound words by capitalising each chunk to preserve its identity. This produces “camel” words with a range of “humps”.
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:…
