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The abbreviated name of the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, VISTA (named in 1996), is not the same as the unabbreviated word vista, meaning a view or prospect, an avenue or passageway opening onto such a view, or a mental view. Nor is it the same as the second word in the name Windows Vista (announced in 2005), which is a proper-noun form of the unabbreviated word, as is John Wall's business software and services company, Vista (formed in 1999). In English when we convert an unabbreviated noun into a proper noun, we capitalize just the first letter, as Microsoft and Wall have done here.
Our VISTA is like the abbreviated names for Volunteers in Service to America (formed in 1964), Ventura Intercity Service Transit Authority (formed in 1994), Visible & Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (announced in 2000 and due to be completed this summer), and the emerging market Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina. All of these names fall into that special class of abbreviations known as acronyms, words formed entirely of the initial letters of other words and hence capitalized entirely in uppercase, or smallcaps, or (as I will propose) in special cases in smallcaps with the first letter in uppercase, but never with a mix of upper-and-lower case.
That is, the name of our software is not and never was properly capitalized in text matter as VistA, despite the widespread practice even by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), WorldVistA, the VistA Software Alliance, and others.
Written English words appear in two different contexts, text settings and display settings, for which typesetters understand there to be two different sets of rules. Text settings adhere to the rules of English grammar, including capitalization. Display settings, such as advertising, title pages, logos, and so on, fall somewhere between text and art; the typesetter understands that the rules may be bent or stretched to adjust the emotional or aesthetic impact of the words. Although a great deal of thought goes into the design of display settings, so does a great deal of fad and fashion, which pass through the practice of display typesetting in waves so pronounced that most such work can be precisely dated later on. That is, what seems fresh today tends to seem fresh to everyone all at once; today's fresh is tomorrow's cliche. Current crazes include all-lowercase names and titles, rounded, wide, thin, sans-serif typefaces, and happy, shiny, friendly text treatments like reflections, glows, and shadows (spend some time searching the web for famous logos redone in Web 2.0 format, and you'll see what I mean; I'm especially fond of the Quaker Oats spoof).
Good or bad, all of this play with the rules is permitted in display settings such as logos, but not in text settings, not even with names in text. The logo of the television show Planet Earth may be in lowercase Helvetica Extended Thin, but in text matter the name is capitalized like any other proper noun. The film with the name Seven had a logo in which the v was replaced with the numeral 7 like this:
SE7EN
; this distinction between names and logos so confounds most of us that to this day otherwise educated fans of the film will pounce on anyone who spells the name correctly and insist they misspell it as the logo does. When this kind of confusion occurs, when a writer loses track of the difference between a name and a logo and begins using logo treatment in text, the result is called a logogram, a logo masquerading as a word. In The Elements of Typographic Style, master typographer Robert Bringhurst sums up the problem with logograms like VistA:Logograms present a more difficult question. An increasing number of persons and institutions, from e. e. cummings to WordPerfect, now come to the typographer in search of special treatment. In earlier days it was kings and deities whose agents demanded that their names be written in a larger size or set in a specially ornate typeface; now it is business firms and mass-market products demanding an extra helping of capitals, or a proprietary face, and poets pleading, by contrast, to be left entirely in the vernacular lower case. But type is visible speech, in which gods and men, saints and sinners, poets and business executives are treated fundamentally alike. Typographers, in keeping with the virtue of their trade, honor the stewardship of texts and implicitly oppose private ownership of words.
Logotypes and logograms push typography in the direction of hieroglyphics, which tend to be looked at rather than read. They also push it toward the realm of candy and drugs, which tend to provoke dependent responses, and away from the realm of food, which tends to promote autonomous being. Good typography is like bread: ready to be admired, appraised and dissected before it is consumed.
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As penance, I pledge to work to educate people and organizations as to the correct capitalization of the name of our software and our new organization. The following guidelines apply to text settings, since in display settings you are restricted only by the bounds of creativity and (if we are lucky) good taste. The VISTA Expertise Network does not insist others follow these guidelines, only that we do.
First, it will probably never be proper to use roman lowercase anywhere in the name VISTA. Although laser and radar traveled the road from allcaps acronyms to lowercase unabbreviated words, they were neologisms and so did not have to displace existing English words to make their metamorphosis from acronymic abbreviations to unabbreviated words. VISTA by contrast deliberately echoes the English word vista, and so cannot ever lose its capitals without creating confusion. This rules out our software ever being referred to as vista or Vista, and the rules of good grammar rule out any logogrammatical mixtures of upper and lowercase such as VistA.
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Fourth, likewise, when acronyms like VISTA appear in boldface, the preferred capitalization is boldface smallcaps; when in italics, sloped smallcaps are preferred. In either situation, when smallcaps are unavailable, bold or italic allcaps, respectively, are acceptable if not optimal. Very few typefaces include true sloped smallcaps, but given their importance for setting text that includes both acronyms and italics, it is worth choosing one of those typeface for such text; very few support bold smallcaps, even fewer support both bold smallcaps and sloped smallcaps, and only very unusual typefaces (like Optima nova) support both those and bold-italic smallcaps. The OpenType font revolution is increasing the availability of such typographic features but still has a long way to go to reach the full needed range of features to gracefully handle acronyms in all text situations.
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After all this discussion about capitalization, some of you are wondering "Why bother? Who cares? It's just nitpicking. Don't sweat the little stuff." The answer is that you care, whether you realize it or not, for three reasons.
The rules of capitalization evolved to reduce the strain of reading, which is after all an unnatural act. Through trial and error, we learned that lowercase roman is easiest on the eye, and the other cases and styles need to be used sparingly, especially uppercase, each to perform its own specialized modification of the text. The proliferation of acronyms has increased the irritation of reading text in which they occur, like little pointless shouts, overly mannered and exaggerated. Proper use of smallcaps with acronyms helps soothe that subtle irritation, and after all, we do not particularly want the name of our software to be irritating if we can help it.
Also, the rules of good manners evolved to reduce the strain of interacting with other human beings by having them show you little courtesies in any interaction, a show of respect, like spelling and capitalizing your name correctly. If others cannot be bothered to get your name right, it means they do not respect you enough to make even a minimal effort at courtesy, so any further interaction would be a waste of your time. If, on the other hand, you cannot be bothered to get your own name right, well that leads to my third point:
Finally, sweating the little stuff distinguishes engineers from civilians. The craft of engineering is the art of achieving a big-picture accomplishment by attending to all the small-detail steps correctly. If engineers did not sweat the little stuff, you would be dead many times over by now. If we care enough to get the details right in our engineering, then it behooves us to get the details right in our communication so that we correctly convey to our audience our passion for excellence and our attention to detail. There's nothing like misspelling your own name to make others wonder if you really know what you're doing.
Sincerely yours,
Rick Marshall
Executive Director
VISTA Expertise Network
Postscript: For a fairly extensive listing of all the vistas out there, check out Wikipedia's page at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vista.
3 comments:
Dear Readers,
I'm not surprised this post in particular got no comments and is having no effect on how the community spells the name of its software.
An ironic pattern we observed in the MUMPS Development Committee was that "The magnitude of the disagreement over an issue is inversely proportional to its importance." We tend to argue the most over the smallest things, to resist changing little things more than big things.
Capitalization and spelling should be easy to agree on, but in truth people have become very attached to that error ("VistA") I created and promoted in the 1990s. Many community members now consider it a mark of being part of the "in crowd," our community's special identity. I've heard people tell me it's cool, or neat, or special, or the officially correct way to do it.
Part of the problem is that no one remembers anymore how to capitalize words in English. People think either it's a mystery (so why bother learning the rules) or a matter of personal preference (so there aren't any rules that matter) or up to official sources to dictate for each name (so the rule is to do what each organization wants with its own name, i.e., so there's no consistent rule).
None of these things is true. The rules are simple, and they are not arbitrary. There are very good reasons to capitalize as we do in order to preserve the legibility of English text. If we are going to break these rules, we need to have a very good reason.
But we don't.
We break the rules for the most trivial of reasons, or for no reasons at all. We argue "change is good" or "rules are meant to be broken" or "people should get to decide how their own names are capitalized" as though these were all-important absolute truths, which they are not. Neither are they real explanations.
The real reason everyone miscapitalizes the name VISTA is that everyone else is doing it.
Ultimately, it's nothing more than mimesis, the overwhelmingly powerful instinctual drive human beings have to imitate. When people encounter any interesting community, they reflexively look for signals they can imitate to blend in. In our community, "VistA" has become one of those mimetic tics.
Some friends of mine have rationalized more persuasive arguments, but that's all they are: rationalizations. What we see here is not the power of the truth, but two other powers that hold far greater sway over human behavior than the truth ever will: the drive to conform to our chosen groups, and the drive to justify our current behavior.
No matter how smart we are, no matter how good our intentions, no matter how hard we work, there remains a certain irreducible "sheeple" instinct in all of us. No matter how hard we work to cover it up, the "sheeple" drive leaks out from time to time, exposing our human fallibility like a loud fart in an elevator. Under our fine rhetoric, some of what we say amounts to "baa": we belong in the herd. Whenever I see "VistA," I hear that "baa" and grin.
I say these things in all affection. I love my community, my friends who work so hard to do some good in the world. I respect their dedication to always learning more, trying harder, improving the software and themselves. It's a great bunch of people, which is why a certain amount of good-natured teasing is in order when we find ourselves behaving in amusingly instinctual ways and trying to rationalize them as anything higher than that.
Yours truly,
Rick
I worked as a technical writer and analyst supporting VA VISTA development for over ten years. In a previous incarnation, I worked in printing and typography.
With that background, you can imagine the headaches the use of the VISTA logogram gave me in my tenure with the VA. And just now I have found and read "Capital Confusion."
It is very satisfying to learn where the "VistA" convention originated. I can deeply relate to the odd dissonance of being the originator of a convention that later comes back to haunt you.
I'm going to retrain my fingers and brain to use VISTA. I applaud you.
Rick, I have resisted this line of reasoning for a while now. Mostly because I thought that it was a sign of respect to call something whatever its creators want it to be called, period.
I know I have read this post before, but it was a long time ago. However, this go round, you have convinced me.
I appreciate the three pillars of classical thought; truth, beauty, and goodness. But I do not believe that any one of the three should completely trump one or more of the others. Like all things, there should be a balance. We should look for a beautiful, truth-filled goodness; a truthful, goodness-indwelling beauty; and a good, beauty-infused truth.
So to that end, you have convinced me that the grammatical rules in question, were created not by tight-lipped English grammarians trying to impose the strict rules of Latin grammar upon English, but were created in service to the three aforementioned classical ideals.
So here I stand corrected in my notions of proper naming. I can do no other.
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