For this CamelCase Wednesday, we decided to try a little (unscientific) experiment. How much CamelCase would we find in reading our daily paper? What would that say about the usefulness of the convention?
So we took up not just any daily paper, but the paper of record: The New York Times.
Much to our suprise, we found 85 individual examples of CamelCasing in Wednesday’s paper. Of course, due to AP style and the grammatical stodginess of the grey lady, none of these were in the text of articles. In fact, the majority of the CamelCasing — a full 69 instances — were out of the Business section alone. Why?
In the tightly packet market and futures pages, names of companies and commodities were often CamelCased in their full length or shortened versions to lend visual clarity. In a section written for an audience with no time to spare for style, CamelCase is an efficient way to make the information they need to know stand out. That same reasoning is exactly why we use it ourselves.
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