Taking the P With Wordpress
August 31st, 2007 · by David Bradley
Ever worried about your upper and lower case? Well, I used to for reasons that will become clear, but I’m not so fussed these days. However, some bloggers find capitalization very much an ongoing concern.
According to Ryan Imel on ThemePlayGround: “It’s WordPress, not Wordpress. This one’s very common. WordPress is a trademark. If you want it to appear that you respect it, you really should.”
It may very well be WordPress with a big P as opposed to Wordpress with a little p. The problem with trying to enforce such things is not only ignorance or indifference among bloggers but the pressures of newspaper and magazine housestyles whether online or offline. When I was a technical editor at a major UK learned publishers, we used to allow upper case to essentially make the name a proper noun, e.g. Microsoft, but would never have allowed MicroSoft or WorDprESs or anything of that sort. These days, things have changed at that particular publisher and you get things like InChI being allowed and actually recommended, which is fair enough, but that’s basically because they changed their housestyle to allow such acronyms and abbreviations to be used as their creators wished as to how an archaic housestyle dictated. When I read things like “Aids virus” it feels that housestyle can be far more problematic than concerns about whether it’s Wordpress or WordPress.
For my sins, I used to try and insist on SCIENCEbase.com for my science news site and ScienceText.com for this blogging tips site, but I’ve given up on that kind of nonsense and am happy to see it appear either way anywhere (hint, hint, linkbaiting).
Ironically, the filename for Ryan’s original post is: “its-wordpress-not-wordpress” and the blog’s title says “Reviews of Wordpress Plugins and Themes | Testing Free WordPress Themes…” so a bit of a mix in there of little and big P’s. He also states that when bloggers talk of plug-ins for their blogs, they should really be saying Plugins because that too is a TraDeMaRK. Ryan was also offering a “heads up” to his readers regarding his whereabouts, at least at the time of writing. Unfortunately, it looks like “Headsup” may actually be a protected tradename in itself, given that there is a company called Headsup International. I’ve never figured out what a Head Sup is to be honest…
Trademarks are a minefield for journalists and editors, but as long as you don’t say coca cola when referring to a generic cola drink and use upper case Coca Cola when referring to the non-Pepsi product and as long as you don’t google my name but rather Google it, then the companies really cannot complain. Isn’t Wordpress supposed to be open access and open source, community led and “for the people” project anyway, are they really going to sue if someone takes the P?
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15 responses so far ↓
Not trademark related per se, but talking about housestyles… I wrote an article for a publication once about some gadget… a PDA or something. And the publication refused to use abbreviations, so every time I used PDA, USB or URL they expanded it to Personal Digital Assistant, Universal Serial Bus and Uniform Resource Locator.
It totally killed the readability of the article, but they wouldn’t budge on it!!
That is quite bizarre Pete. The usual approach of almost every publisher I’ve worked with, and there are quite a few, is to define at first mention and then use the abbreviation thereafter. It’s the most sensible approach and used to save on ink and space. Not defining an acronym is pretty much a no-no as far as traditional editing goes, but these days you see ludicrous things like “PIN number”, “PDF format” etc, which are almost as silly as not defining at all.
We’re already going through the same thing with ChemSpider and deal with variants of chemspider, ChemSpider and CHEMSpider. I don’t care…let it be what users need it to be…but the website is http://www.chemspider.com. What I can say was that putting ChemSpider on wikipedia and expecting people to know that variant when they would search chemspider was a problem. Wikipedia did NOT automatically deal with the upper case in an ideal fashion. I’m not taking the P by the way…but I am taking the S.
Isn’t it WikiPedia
Maybe not…
d
It’s a common problem that I hold no truck with. What so many companies seem unable (or unwilling) to understand is that the way they present themselves has no bearing on how I as a third party chose to present them. For the record, I often permit a single interstitial cap but no more. Biggest bugbears are those TM and (r) symbols that press releases are littered with. And don’t get me started on companies that insist on trendy all-lowercase names…
I agree, TM and (r) and (c) are all a real pain in the ‘arris, especially in emailed press releases where they normally come across as an ascii code rather than the proper symbol anyway. And, those trendy all lower case names? Like agloco you mean?
I’m with Ryan on this one.
I cringe when I see people using: “Ipod” and: “Itunes”, which is just .. oh no, let’s not.
The fact is, writing at its most basic level is storytelling. So you either do it right and make correct, faithful reference to the protagonists or you just don’t do it at all…
But, where do you draw the line Wayne…I spent an hour yesterday trying to correctly type InChI and InChIKey. It would be so much easier if the guys who came up with this unique chemical identifier simply called it an Inchi. In fact, it was an Ichi at one point (then NIST joined in the fun and games and wanted an n). Now, they’ve improved it and added Key it’s just so messy.
Point taken re iPod, it would be silly to have Ipod, yes, but it’s only on a marketing executive’s whim that it is iPod in the first place. They could easily have called it the I-pod or the Ipod, or the I-Pod or any other combination.
As to storytelling, when the format of the type and housestyle get in the way of the story itself then someone has lost the plot.
d@vID Br4Dl3y
Your example probably looks like a bad example.
Not bad in the sense that’s in inapplicable, but bad in the sense that it’s just bad that you had all that work on your hands.
I can’t really comment on chemistry, so I don’t know how much things like that are subject to change…
Fair enough. I realize that Wordpress is not quite the same as a big commercial concern with its own lettering whims, in terms of the demands they might place on housestyle, but if I type Wordpress with a first couple and forget to capitalize the P, the story doesn’t change. Same with Inchi, not quite so with AIDS.
AIDS is a really good example. And what about VoIP? Or fMRI? And then there’s NeXT. Or at least there was!
David, there’s an entire ‘blog post in this lot somewhere…
Yes, Voip does look silly, and fMRI is not quite right, but only really to those who know. But, where do you stand on SLITDRESS, INEPT, TOCSY, and TOSY, and what about COSY and DOSY, and even NOESY, all NMR spectroscopy techniques, distant cousins of MRI…?
Well now acronyms are something else all together, aren’t they?
Should we delimit them with a (.) or just leave them as they are?
BTW, IMHO, I’d say that they look OK sans the period marks…
You really like making life difficult for yourselves, David and Wayne. Keep it simple: if it is pronounced as a word (like Aids), spell it lower case. If it is pronounced as a series of letters (HIV) then it takes caps.
You might think Ipod looks odd, but that is how it is pronounced so it makes sense to me. Words routinely become downgraded as they become more familiar. You wouldn’t dream of writing ‘radar’ with any caps, but a few years ago you would. Voip will look normal in a couple of years.
Russ, I think you’re probably right. Like you say, Aids is an acronym rather than an abbreviation and so it’s becoming increasingly common to see it as Aids rather than AIDS, I don’t think I’ve seen it as A.I.D.S. for a long, long time, but I bet there are some publications out there that use that housestyle. As to radar, check. Ditto laser etc.
Voip may never diffuse into the common psyche in the way that lasers and radar have because there will probably be some hybrid cellphone-wifi-phone to take its place and people will start talking of a WiPhones or something similar.
Hey, there’s an idea for a domain name that might be worth grabbing now…
Wayne, I’m ROFL, LOL, and saying TTFN all rolled into one…amazing what threads on a blog will capture the readers’ imagination and lead to an ongoing discussion, is it not?
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