If I could be guaranteed that a gender-bending Canadian torch-twang-pop singer would be the only person ever to be associated with the all-lowercase conceit, I'd be inclined to cap and let cap. But people are weird, and they're not getting any less so. It won't be long before reporters start submitting man-on-the-street quotes from "john smith."
From a Columbia News Service article on "cuddle parties":
REiD (the mix of capital and small letters is by choice) Mihalko, 36, and Marcia Baczynski, 26, self-described healers and sex educators in Manhattan, originally conceived of cuddle parties as a way for their friends, deprived of human touch, to get a regular dose of nonsexual human contact.
UPDATE, Sept. 2: GQ tells us about "REiD (yes, that's how he writes it)." Apparently the G stands for "dumb-" and the Q stands for "-shit."
9 comments:
If it's REiD, then why not MiHALKO?
Couple o' years ago, a wicked-cool traveling musician named "johnsmith" played at our humble church in Colorado. (I bought one of his CDs and still listen to it once in a while.)
Actually, it is MiHALKO, or something like that, in some online references. I'm happy to report that, as far as I can tell, no newspaper has published his name with unconventional capitalization.
The whole thing reminds me of Sarah Jessica Parker in "L.A. Story."
"My name's SanDeE. That's big S, little A, little N, big D, little E, big E. With a star at the end."
What an iDiOT.
Yep. I used both Tony's and Holbrook's examples when making fun of this stuff in "Lapsing Into a Comma."
I'm happy to report that, as far as I can tell, no newspaper has published his name with unconventional capitalization.If only we could say the same about Matchbox Twenty.
I work for a music-industry paper and we've had to declare that nobody gets any dopey styling except one cap in the middle. It's K.D. Lang and Matchbox Twenty, but SheDaisy is OK (though not, as they would prefer, SHeDAISY). And all 400 or so hip-hop people who are called "Lil" something or other are simply Lil This or Lil That, since we don't have time to keep track of who gets an apostrophe and who doesn't. That art gallery would be Seven-Degrees 'round here!
Good work, Apassionata!
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