Capitalization: a new wrinkle or two

We've all seen the new capitalization style, though until about ten years ago, it barely existed.

I'm talking about capitals that appear in middle of words, like eBay and iPhone, iPad and iPod. That's one group.

Another group is on the rise as well. These words have had their space stolen from between two words. Brand names are the main culprits here: think AdSense, MailChimp, MyMeetings.

These new uses of capitalization have had some strange implications. As grammarian-editor Frances Peck reveals in the February issue of West Coat Editor (pdf may be downloaded from the EAC website), writers of style guides are now scratching their heads and disputing with one another over whether the words in the first group, which begin with lower case letters, should be capitalized if they open the sentence, as in the example below:

eBay called me on my iPhone.

For the moment, let's not worry about the meaning. Is this sentence correctly punctuated? Or should it look like this:

EBay called me on my iPhone.

Afraid I don't have a definitive answer to that question. Not yet. The usage is still evolving.