When I rule the world (part 1) ...

... all proper nouns will start with a capital letter and then continue in lower case. I'm sick of tired of reading about k.d. lang and homeMADE and adidas. Worse still, in journalism we often take these clowns and corruptors of our language seriously. The only explanation for this I have heard is that it's the preference of the person or company concerned, as reflected in their branding. Big deal. I have in front of me a box that reads "Kellogg's CORN FLAKES". The packaging hasn't changed in decades, so it is obviously the preference of the Kellogg company to render the name of its flagship product in that manner. No newspaper editor or sub-editor I have ever known would dream of capitalising the words "corn flakes" in print, yet we fall over ourselves to indulge the likes of camilla and marc and, until recently, silverchair. It makes no sense whatsoever to allow exceptions to the rules of our language and of common sense, but I can take you to media workplaces all over the country where grown-up people waste serious amounts of time (and therefore increasingly hard-to-come-by money) deciding when to do just that.