Combo Names

Dear Hank;
September 20, 2006
Re: Combo Names

I’m sure there’s a term for what I’m about to describe but I don’t know what it is and I haven’t yet come up with a clever name myself. Maybe we’ll have to have a contest to “Name the Phenomena” and only you my loyal fans and subscribers will be allowed to participate – but I digress.
I first notice this when I was talking to my financial planner at A. G. Edwards. He told me to send him mail at agedwards. I couldn’t help noticing that if read aged wards. I found this hysterically funny, well lightly amusing. Did he work at a place where old orphans hung out? Get it? Yeah, you do. The internet has spawned the idea of putting multiple words together, ostensibly to form an address but sometimes the combined words can form another grouping like the A. G. Edwards – Aged Wards example.
I ran into another one today Baltimoresun. Is that Baltimore Sun or Baltimores Un?
There are also other questions that arise when combining words; a problem programmers have been dealing with in function calls for years.
If one word ends in the letter that the next word starts with do you drop one of the letters, put the two together, capitalize the second one? For Example:

rickkinnaird
rickinnaird
rickKinnaird

And there is the whole capitalization question, should it be:

Rickkinnaird
RickKinnaird

rickinnaird
Rickinnaird
ricKinnaird
RicKinnaird?

Or would underbars, dashes or dots help, such as:

Rick_Kinnaird
Rick-Kinnaird
Rick.Kinnaird

Generally, the underbars, dashes and dots have been abandoned on the internet. The dots have significance to the interpretation of the address, so that’s understandable. The underbar and the dash are probably too hard to explain to people, It’s R I C K followed by an underbar not a dash; that’s the shift dash character un-huh. Then it’s K ….

Let’s not even try and discuss front slash (/) and back slash (\).

Then there’s the ultra-clever What if one word ends in several letters that match the next word? situation. Such as:

Centerminal, (Center Terminal)

What about a movie title like
Stand and Deliver?
Wow, the possibilities:
Standeliver,
StanDeliver,
Standanddeliver,
Stand&Deliver,
The mind reels … (the mind reals!!! Get it?? Ha ha ha <- something else the internet has given us.)