StudlyCaps

This article may not meet the general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. (October 2008)

StudlyCaps (or perhaps StUdLyCaPs, also known as StickyCaps) is a variation of CamelCase in which the individual letters in a word (or words) are capitalized and not capitalized, either at random or in some pattern.

History

According to the Jargon File "ThE oRigiN and SigNificaNce of thIs pRacTicE iS oBscuRe."^[1] It appears to have been popularized among adolescent users during the BBS and early WWW eras of online culture, as a form of rebellion against the traditional rules of capitalization. Unlike the use of all lowercase letters, which suggests laziness or efficiency as a motivation, StudlyCaps requires additional effort to type, either holding and releasing the Shift key with one hand while hunting-and-pecking, or alternately pressing one Shift key or the other while touch typing. The iNiQUITY BBS software based on Renegade had a feature to support this automatically.

Use

It may perform a similar social function as the reduced legibility of the highly stylised script commonly used in graffiti.^{[citation needed]} The overt defiance of rules distinguishes it from most forms of CamelCase which, despite their defiance of traditional typographic rules for language, are noteworthy for their adherence to authority-established standards specifying which letters are to be capitalized and which are not.

Example

The online and print comic Mac Hall uses StudlyCaps to represent both the slurred speech of drunk characters^[2] and the unearthly speech of a Nemesis^[3]. It is also used similarly to represent the speech of a demonic entity in Marathon RED, a computer game total conversion by the same author.

See also

• CamelCase
• Leet
• Warez

References