Alternating caps,[1] also known asstudly caps,[a]sticky caps (where "caps" is short forcapital letters), orspongecase (in reference to the "Mocking SpongeBob" internet meme) is a form of text notation in which the capitalization of letters varies by some pattern, or arbitrarily (often also omitting spaces between words and occasionally some letters). An example of this would be spelling "alternating caps" as "aLtErNaTiNg CaPs".
According to theJargon File, the origin and significance of the practice is obscure.[3] The term "alternating case" has been used as early as the 1970s, in several studies onword identification.[4][5]
Arbitrary variation found popularity among adolescent users during theBBS and earlyWWW eras of online culture, as if in parody of the marginally less idiosyncraticcapitalization found in commontrade and service marks of the time. This method was extensively used since the 1980s in the BBS-world andwarez scene (for example inFILE_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").[citation needed]The iNiQUiTY BBS software based onRenegade 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.[6]
Ameme known as "MockingSpongeBob" more broadly popularized using alternating caps to convey a mocking tone starting in May 2017,[7][8] leading to alternating caps becoming a mainstream method of conveying mockery in text.[1][8]
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Alternating caps are typically used to display mockery in text messages.[1]
The randomized capitalization leads to the flow of words being broken, making it harder for the text to be read as it disruptsword identification even when the size of the letters is the same as inuppercase orlowercase.[5][9]
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 whilehunting-and-pecking, by intermittently pressing one shift key or the other whiletouch typing, or by using an online tool to convert existing text.
The term 'StudlyCaps' in PSR-1 MUST be interpreted as PascalCase where the first letter of each word is capitalized including the very first letter.
College students read a passage presented in AlTeRnAtInG cAsE on a CRT while their eye movements were monitored.
The prose passage was on the left page of a booklet, in upper case, lower case, or alternating case. This experiment, then, has shown that the alternating-case condition does, in fact, lead to impaired word identification, even when character size is the same for upper- and lowercase characters.
However, as you might guess, reading alternating case is more effortful than reading all lower case or all uppercase text [...] It may be that alternating case disrupts normal word identification processes
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