Lower cased names

[Sobes]

Shane has a new coworker whose name is in all lowercase, she's apparently gotten it legally changed that way. We were discussing that and MIL used to work with another high school councelor who did that, too (though not legally, she just insisted her name be lowercased, which the school was not crazy about.)

Anyhow, have you ever heard of that? I know the losercase look is pretty modern lookign right now - our newspaper used to have that look and it mimics online typing and all that, but I've never heard of people doing that with their nononline names.

[speechykeen]

Maybe e.e. cummings was ahead of his time, eh?

[ClaudiaD]

Other than e.e. cummings, I hadn't heard of that, but I guess it's not too surprising. People will do almost anything to stand out. It does seem a bit obnoxious though...you can already write your own name however you want, but to legally change your name to lowercase and/or insist that others follow your idiosyncratic rule...I don't know, I guess it would irk me a little bit, and maybe that's the point. Getting lots of attention. But I would be curious what reasons these people give for using only lowercase. Has Shane asked his coworker?

[ckevans]

The African-American poet bell hooks also uses lower case for her name:



http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/contempo...bell_hooks.html (http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/contemporaryed/Bell_Hooks/bell_hooks.html)

[owl]

kd lang comes to mind. I like it, but I wouldn't expect most people who aren't famous to be taken seriously if trying to use it in every day life.

[Panya]

e.e. cummings and k.d. lang are the only people I knew did this, and I didn't think you could do that legally, just professionally or whatever [sort of like how the band Korn really has the 'r' uppercase and backward, but you can't type it like that, so it's not their legal spelling]. Anyway I *really* don't like it -- IRL or online -- it makes it too difficult to read. I agree with Claudia -- I think it's pretentious and annoying.

[kacykc]

I don't see the point :scratch:

[RedJacks]

IMO it makes you seem like less of a person... I mean, you capitalize because you're a person. Just like in the sentence, "Where'd Mom go?" you capitalize 'mom' because it takes the place of her name.

This may be harsh, but I think they're just belittling themselves.

[Sobes]

I don't know if I'd go that far. My user name (and a lot of others) is lowercased. For two years we printed all of our bylines in the newspaper in all lowercase. Neither was due to wanting to belittle ourselves. Besides, I capitalize my cat's name, too. We don't capitalize because we're people, we capitalize because we're proper nouns.

So maybe some people aren't into being proper?

[KNY]

If anything, I think the lower case names draw attention to themselves, because they are the opposite of what the reader expects to see. On that page about bell hooks, I kept noticing all those sentences that began with "hooks" and thinking "How odd!" or "Oh wait, that's a person?"

So I don't know if the person does it to stand out, or does it to blend in and ironically ends up standing out :)