Alternating caps,
also known as studly caps, sticky caps (where "caps" is short for
capital letter
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing system ...
s), or spongecase (in reference to the "Mocking Spongebob" internet meme) is a form of text notation in which the capitalization of letters varies by some pattern, or arbitrarily (often also omitting spaces between words and occasionally some letters). An example of this would be spelling "alternating caps" as "aLtErNaTiNg CaPs".
History
According to the
Jargon File
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT AI Lab ...
, the origin and significance of the practice is obscure. The term "alternating case" has been used as early as the 1970s, in several studies on
word identification.
Arbitrary variation found popularity among adolescent users during the
BBS and early
WWW eras of online culture, as if in parody of the marginally less idiosyncratic
capitalization
Capitalization ( North American spelling; also British spelling in Oxford) or capitalisation (Commonwealth English; all other meanings) is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in ...
found in common
trade and service marks of the time. This method was extensively used since the 1980s in the BBS-world and
warez
Warez refers to pirated software and other copyrighted digital media—such as video games, movies, music, and e-books—illegally distributed online, often after bypassing digital rights management (DRM). The term, derived from “software wa ...
scene (for example in
FILE_ID.DIZ
FILE_ID.DIZ is a plain-text file containing a brief description of the content of the archive formats, archive to which it belongs.
Such files were originally used in archives distributed through bulletin board systems (BBSes) and is still used ...
and
.nfo files) to show "elite" (or elitist) attitude, the often used variant was using small-caps vowels and capitalised consonants ("THiS iS aN eXCePTioNaLLy eLiTe SeNTeNCe.") or reversed capitals ("eXTENDED kEY gENERATOR pRO").
The iNiQUiTY BBS software based on
Renegade had a feature to support two variants of this automatically: either all vowels would be uppercase or all vowels would be lowercase, with the consonants as the other case.
A
meme
A meme (; ) is an idea, behavior, or style that Mimesis, spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying c ...
known as "Mocking
SpongeBob" more broadly popularized using alternating caps to convey a mocking tone starting in May 2017,
leading to alternating caps becoming a mainstream method of conveying mockery in text.
Usage and effect
Alternating caps are typically used to display mockery in text messages.
The randomized capitalization leads to the flow of words being broken, making it harder for the text to be read as it disrupts
word identification even when the size of the letters is the same as in
uppercase
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''#Majuscule, majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally ''#Minuscule, minuscule'') in the written representation of certain langua ...
or
lowercase
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing system ...
.
Unlike the use of all-lowercase letters, which suggests laziness as a motivation, alternating caps requires additional effort to type, either by holding and releasing the shift key with one hand while
hunting-and-pecking, by intermittently pressing one shift key or the other while
touch typing
Touch typing (also called blind typing, or touch keyboarding) is a style of typing. Although the phrase refers to typing without using the sense of visual perception, sight to find the keys—specifically, a touch typist will know their location ...
, or by using an online tool to convert existing text.
See also
*
Camel case
The writing format camel case (sometimes stylized autological, autologically as camelCase or CamelCase, also known as camel caps or more formally as medial capitals) is the practice of writing phrases without spaces or punctuation and with cap ...
*
All caps
In typography, text or font in all caps (short for "all capitals") contains capital letters without any lowercase letters. For example: All-caps text can be seen in legal documents, advertisements, newspaper headlines, and the titles on book co ...
Notes
References
Capitalization
Internet culture
Orthography
{{Typography terms