Huh?

TIALY is an acronym my friend, Amy, and I use.  Amy had some wrist issues, once upon a time, and was using a dictation program to type.  If you’ve ever used a dictation program, you know that they are prone to errors.  This particular one, however, has entered our email and texting lexicon.  (I don’t mean the universal “our;” just Amy’s and mine.)

What Amy was trying to write was “This is hilarious.”

What the software heard was “This is a Larry, yes?”

It just struck us funny.  We laughed and laughed.  And then we decided that the comparative and superlative forms for conveying electronic amusement are:

LOL
ROFL
and…

TIALY!

None of which really has anything to do with this post, but I thought you needed to understand the headline.  And I don’t really have that much to say about this Friday’s Find, except that I find it hilarious.

It’s a term of art.  (‘Term of art’ is sort of the same thing as saying ‘technical terminology’ but, hey, we all know that I, for one, prefer art.)

It’s a term of art in the world of typesetting.

The term is CamelCase.

I don’t know why, but I find it highly amusing.  (Probably goes back to that old vaudeville tenet that K sounds are funny.*)

Anyway, if you haven’t encountered this term before it’s the term for what you see there—CamelCase —where there is a capital letter in the middle of a word.  Like ‘iPod’—a very famous example of CamelCase.

It’s called that because the capital in the middle reminded somebody of the hump on a camel’s back.

And because “camel” is funny.

TIALY!