Grammar Girl here, a listener named Pete was reading his copy of my book The Grammar

Devotional and came across my entry about camel case.

The practice of squishing two or more words together, but keeping the first letter of the

second or third words capitalized so that the word looks like a camel with the hump

in the middle.

I gave his examples MySpace, which has the S in Space Capitalized, and the band name

Outcast, which has the K in Cast Capitalized.

In general, I don't like camel case.

I talked about the history, which is probably related to computer programming restrictions

that mean you can't have spaces and variables and file names.

And I concluded that, quote, marketers decided it was a trendy way to make a company name

stand out, unquote.

It takes exception to my conclusion and makes an interesting point.

He said, quote, there's a key piece of information missing here.

A major force driving the spread of camel case is quite specifically the desire for a

.com web URL that corresponds to your company or brand.

In the top level .com domain, virtually every simple English word is taken.

The easiest way to find a .com address that's both memorable and available is to combine

two words.

Your newfound URL can't have a space in it, so neither can your new company or brand.

But if you don't capitalize the second word, you get a compound word instead of two words,

and the effect is often strange.

...