Do you lowercase screen names when they start a sentence? (page 2)

seeitallclearlynow

Call me neurotic, but I struggle with this question, I do. It grips me late at night when my normally agile typing fingers hesitate, unsure, before the name of a poster that is lowercase, but which I want to use at the beginning of a sentence.

Well, this has bothered me too, not only at the beginning of the sentence, but also midsentence.

Seattleniceguy, you are such a fantastic poster; really, I find no one else who says things quite like you do. And now, I find no one else who says things THAT apparently only you, and maybe funkyderek, would care to say!

All I know about this most important use of English written grammar is, as long as both seattleniceguy and funkyderek continue to post here, the rest does not matter, and I'm happy.

NewLight2

In my case, I like to be addressed as "NewLight2" or "NL2" with emphasis on the "2". The reason being that JWD also has a poster with almost the same screen-name as mine. Otherwise it would not matter to me.

NewLight2

seattleniceguy

Aww...seeit, that was so nice of you to say! Thank you! I'm glad you're here too.

SNG

xjw_b12

I don't think I'd even attempt to type this name out............. ?£âzârú§?Çhùrçh?

and as for Holey_Cheeses*King_of_the juice. I just call him Cheeses

funkyderek

seattleniceguy:

This is something I've struggled with, and until now, I thought I was the only one pedantic enough to care. In normal written English proper nouns are capitalised, as are the first words in sentences. I try to follow these rules where appropriate. However, the Internet has its own rules. One of those is that usernames should be in lower case with no spaces. (After working for an ISP for five years, that's almost become a mantra for me.) That particular rule doesn't strictly apply on this forum but as I simply used my Yahoo! username, I kept it in the same format. So, how do we resolve this in a satisfactory way? What I have started doing recently (but still don't do consistently) is putting usernames in bold print. This allows me to preserve the user's own preferred formatting while differentiating it enough from the surrounding text to allow it to stand on its own, even in lower case. Further, it helps draw the addressee's attention to the post. Using the full username correctly spelled and spaced also makes searching easier.

For my own username, I don't care too much if the case is changed. As long as it's spelt correctly I'm fine, and even if it's not, I've learned to control myself and will no longer openly scorn someone who misspells my username. If my name (i.e. Derek) is being used alone I prefer it to have an initial capital.

Narkissos

When I began posting I capitalised all posters' aliases, I just recently noticed that was not the Internet usage.

Narkissos of the "spelling obsessional neurotics" class... (so glad to see I'm not alone!)

seattleniceguy

[funkyderek:] This is something I've struggled with, and until now, I thought I was the only one pedantic enough to care.

Narkissos of the "spelling obsessional neurotics" class... (so glad to see I'm not alone!)

Grammar nerds unite!

SNG

Do you lowercase screen names when they start a sentence?

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