Today's exquisite corpse

For background, see this.

This is a coincidence, I swear. But today's exquisite corpse comes from Bill Walsh's "Lapsing Into a Comma." It's a great follow-up to yesterday's corpse -- about capitalizing proper nouns, even when companies (or people) don't cap them in logos.

In many, perhaps most, cases, these logo affectations aren't even intended to indicate the preferred style for proper names. E.E. Cummings, for example, used capital letters in his signature. I might sound like a lonely voice on this issue, but Tennis magazine and, believe it or not, Amazon.com illustrate the way capitalization is supposed to work in the grown-up world. For more than 20 years, Tennis magazine was tennis on the cover (it only recently dropped the mod '70s logo) and TENNIS in its own articles (a lot of publications like self-referential caps) -- but Tennis in real life. And those writers who try to be oh-so-modern and oh-so-accommodating by writing "amazon.com" might want to double-check the way the on-line bookstore refers to itself outside logo-land (and even in some of its myriad logo styles). That's right: It's Amazon.com.

If you're disturbed by Walsh's use of the hyphen in online, rest assured. He came around in his next book.