Capital letters within product names...

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SpyderNoir_JHA

Joined
Aug 26, 2005
Messages
55
So I was just browsing around the websites of a few of my favorite products today and I noticed something: between Spyderco's "PlainEdge" and "SpyderEdge" options and the flashlight company SureFire, quite a few producers of (how to say it?) cool stuff use words that capitalize a letter within the word. Or, more accurately, I suppose, just run two words, each beginning with capital letters, together. Let me be the first to say that I'm not criticizing this (as a guy called SpyderNoir ought not to do,) I'm just thinking that it's an interesting trend.

Can anyone else give any examples?
 
All I know is that even though I have an education I forget how to spell sometimes because of how badly Advertising, Marketing and product names have bastardized the English language.

The internet makes it worse.

Ahem, by the way, is Blade Forums one word or two. ;)

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SpyderNoir_JHA;

Is this just one of those irrelevent topics to increase your post count to 4 ? :p , or are you simply noting a curious feature, which you have recently noticed common to product marketing ? :confused:


In my opinion, I assume for several reasons, that it is simply a result of marketing.........

The "SpyderEdge", is a trademark of Spyderco, and as such, when giving a title to a product, you generally choose titles which visually look good, sound good, and are interesting in order to appeal to consumer's.

Take SureFire for example.
In my opinion, it's much easier to name your brand using one word, and if it were 2 separate words, Sure Fire, IMO, it does not look as good, nor is it as visually eye-catching, and it also takes longer to pronounce, in that by separating the words, it becomes a 2 separate syllable brand name.
So they could have used; Surefire. However this changes the way in which consumer's view the brand, and also by using a capital letter to enhance the second word of the name, it gives more importance to the second part of the name, and thus makes it just as important, as visually eye-catching as the start of the name. So between "SureFire", and "Surefire",.... which is going to catch more consumer interest, and what is going to look better when being marketed, and advertised on billboards, magazines and so forth ??. It becomes a decision to the marketer or advertiser, or company on how they wish to present themselves or a particular product.

Same as Spyderco's "SpyderEdge". It is Spyderco's title to represent their serration pattern on blades, and so as a marketing tool, it separates the 2 words, but also blends them into 1 brandname. If it were "Spyderedge", it may not look as good, or it may not portray a particular message, or highlight exactly what is desired by the company. Same as if it were "Spyder Edge"....... it generally can often be a much better marketing brandname, if it were combined. Also when abbreviations are used in product descriptions, SE is the abbreviation for "SpyderEdge", and so by using a capital, it highlights the "Edge", so at the same time distinguishing it from the "Spyder" part, yet also combining it into one trademark brandname.

Just as you use "SpyderNoir", I assume you wanted to highlight the "Noir", to make it just as noticable to the forum, as the "Spyder" part, and as such you wanted to create 2 words to be just as meaningful as the other, but blended into one to make it more unique, more original, interesting, or what have you, it just gives the name more "umpf" than say for example; "Spydernoir", or "Spyder Noir", "Umpf" being through a visual means, grammer or pronounciation means, or simply just to have something different, all in all, it's the same notion as advertising, and marketing of brandnames and products, in that the idea of marketing a product, is to spark interest, acquire consumer attention, and basically make your product stand out from the competitor's products, and the rest of the market.

These are just some quick points, of which I personally see as using a particular means, in this situation, capital letters to highlight 2 separate words which have been blended into 1 to form a recognisable trademark of a particular brand/company, to advertise, and therefore successfully market a company's brand, or product.
 
I wouldn't be supprised if a big part of it has to do with internet searchability. Words like SpyderEdge and SureFire give you more accurate results than Sure Fire or Spyder Edge.
 
I wonder if it could have leaked into mainstream usage from the computing industry. One style of naming program variables is to concatenate several words, using the initial capital to set off the words. This was a popular Unix / X Window style; used fewer characters, but could create meaningful and readable variable names. The only difference is that the very first letter was usually not capitalized (e.g., knifeHandleMaterial, bladeSteel, etc.)
 
Nah, the whopping 4 post count isn't all that important to me. I think people have some good points on the topic, though. I, too, believe the Internet plays a role. Take our illustrious forum, for example. Blade forums is two words. But how to show that in a URL? Well, obviously, the computer doesn't care what the cases are, but one thing it does care about is spaces: you can't have 'em. So how do we show a human observer that we're not speaking German and we really aren't just combining two words into one big one? We write "Blade forums" as "BladeForums". I account for my name the same way. Years ago, when I was creating it for some messenger service, I wanted it to be clear that spyder and noir were two separate words, hence SpyderNoir.

Now, I suspect that companies like SureFire simply adopted the technique for its visual appeal. They were not doing it to combine two words, as the American Heritage Dictionary recognizes "surefire" as one unified word or, alternately, a hyphenated word. But when Spyderco named it's serrated blades "SpyderEdge" they were combining two words in a manner similar to my own name. (Since this example makes it plainly suspicious, let me say now that I did not create my name to coincide with Spyderco's edge-naming policy, nor even the name of the company.)

But anyway, so as to make this applicable to this forum, and not simply a post on modern language usage, I reiterate my initial question:

Can anybody come up with any other examples of this phenomenon in knife/tool naming?


(I just read Kickaha's theory... I hadn't considered that before, but I like it.)
 
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