Alternating caps

History

According to the Jargon File, 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 found in common trade and service marks of the time. This method was extensively used since the 1980s in the BBS-world and warez scene (for example in FILE_ID.DIZ 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 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 or lowercase.

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, or by using an online tool to convert existing text.

Notes

References

References

1. "PSR-12: Extended Coding Style - PHP-FIG".
2. (29 December 2003). "studlycaps". The Jargon File, version 4.4.7.
3. (1979). "Is visual information integrated across successive fixations in reading?". Perception & Psychophysics.
4. (1974). "Case alternation impairs word identification". Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society.
5. http://www.iniquitybbs.com/docs/iniquity.docs.html {{Dead link. (June 2018)
6. Hathaway, Jay. (May 9, 2017). "'Mocking Spongebob' is the most insulting meme of 2017".
7. Madison Malone Kircher. (17 May 2017). "WhAt Is Up WiTh ThAt WeIrD, NeW SpOnGeBoB MeMe?".
8. Galluci, Nicole. (19 June 2019). "A look at the Ubiquitous Habit of capitalizing letters to make A Point".
9. (29 February 2016). "Digital Fonts And Reading". World Scientific Publishing Company.