In an attempt to find out the name for the trend (especially in the tech world: twitter, flickr, I’m talking to you) that is the intentional usage of the lower case for proper nouns that should be capitalized, I did some Googling yesterday, which just happened to be National Punctuation Day. But instead of an answer, I found this list of hilarious Google suggestions for my query.
Apparently these are the most popular searches for questions that begin with “Why” as in, “Why on earth do people insist on refusing to capitalize proper nouns?” I still don’t know and I still don’t know the name for the phenomenon, (do any of you???) but now I know why the sky is blue and why men have nipples. Thanks, Google.
P.S.: Try googling the other W’s and see what crops up. The first one for “what” is “what is twitter?” Ha.
Alexandra Fenwick is an assistant editor at CJR.