I’m not particularly sold on Foursquare – all that stuff about becoming mayor of your local coffee shop sounds a bit daft to me, like all the bun-throwing games I normally ignore on Facebook. Then there’s the natural female instinct to avoid broadcasting your regular haunts to any passing nutter.
However, I do welcome the fact that they named it Foursquare. Not foursquare, or 4square², as @cadburywolf suggested when I raised this on Twitter. And particularly not FourSquare. I was so surprised when I noticed this I had to go and check their official site in case I was wrong.What we’re talking about here is CamelCase, the action of putting two words together to form a new one, so the capitals at the beginning and in the middle give the word a sort of camel shape. There’s a smashing graphic of this on the Wikipedia page which explains its usage in much more detail.
Once you know this phrase you notice it everywhere. BlackBerry. MasterCard. YouTube. MySpace. easyJet (with its cheeky lowercase initial). There’s nothing wrong with it as such; it’s just all starting to feel a bit dated. In the same way that in years to come people will look back at the Noughties and say wasn’t it quaint the way they put an ‘i’ in front of gadgets to make them sound clever.
