Posted by Miguel Cruz on 08/03/06 14:40

"Tony Marston" <tony@NOSPAM.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Not in the English language. 'box', 'Box' and 'BOX' all mean the same
> thing. If there are several different boxes then different identifiers are
> used, such as "the big box", "the small box", etc. Nobody uses different
> combinations of case to identify different instances of "box".

First, until a couple hundred years ago it was common to capitalize
nouns in English as the Germans still do. The capital letter encoded a
grammatical hint. I guess they could have put dollar signs in front of
them but that's water under the bridge. You may still be able to
convince the Germans to do that.

In colloquial English today capital letters can encode all sorts of
meaning. All-caps is used for emphasis. Title case is used, often
ironically, to denote that something has canonical status ("We were all
thinking about the plan, but Morris was thinking about The Plan").

miguel
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