This is not a post irrationally ranting about “newbo evolve”, the Cedar Rapids “music, art and inspiration” festival this weekend that wants to be something like a South by Southwest, charges $375 $402.50 for the high-end pass, and insists on being referred to with lowercase letters.
No, this is a rational rant about what happens when you let artistic types and PR people run roughshod over basic conventions. WE HAVE RULES ABOUT THINGS FOR REASONS. If you want to break the rules, have a darn good reason. There is no good reason, and in fact many bad ones, to all-lowercase the proper name of an event based on an abbreviation for something (the New Bohemia hipster neighborhood, aka NewBo) that doesn’t have that good of name recognition outside the immediate area.
All-lowercase fads (wtf, target?) exist for who knows why, perhaps as a counterpart to insistence on random capitalizations elsewhere. (I think those whose hackles have only now been raised because of certain capitalizations in certain tweets never had to digest a press release or a dispatch from academia, two places where writers love to be Experts on their Fields and put emphasis on their Companies or Products.)
But the capitalization anarchists won’t be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. That place is reserved for those who use periods in typography for dates and phone numbers. (Or the defenders of brutalism. So hard to decide.)