Browsing through the entertaining pages of the musicology blog Dial ‘M’ for Musicology I came across this excellent posting called What Wikipedia is Good For, a gentle reminder to those who rail against the abuses of wikipedia by students that Wikipedia is host to some fantastic arcane articles like this one about the rock umlaut (aka röck döts). My inner pedant rejoices at the subsection on non-gratuitous umlauts in band-naming, and I’m so glad that there is an official-sounding term for the phenomenon, to join some other favourites of mine like CamelCase, sTudLy cAps, apps Hungarian notation and the greengrocer’s apostrophe. For those who thought that this went out with the advent of shrink-wrapped mange tout in polystyrene trays, see this great page of photographic evidence of the greengrocer’s apostrophe. If anyone knows the technical term for putting things in pointless quotations marks on notices, please “leave a comment” below (you see what I mean?).
