A relevant tangent - I'm a composer, and I choose specific caps/non-caps arrangements for my piece titles. It's interesting to see who picks up on these choices and who doesn't. Of course these distinctions are important to me for some reason (though I can't always remember why several years later), and so I try to correct when concert programs are being printed. But it doesn't always work. So in the past year or two, I've been debating whether or not it's worth it to even continue naming them this way. The problem I keep running into, though, is that some pieces just demand atypical configurations of caps/non-caps in their titles.  

Of course, I referred to glenn as Glenn in a post last month. But then, my wife always makes fun of my poor observation skills.

From glenn's comment below, he's no different than anybody else really. We all have our preferred way of referring to ourselves, that we use, but we generally accept a range of other versions from other people and only correct them if they stray too far.  

I find that's true for my online 'name' AND my real name. I write 'orfeo' but frequently get 'Orfeo'. I also respond to 'orf', and various jokes about American cookies I knew nothing about when I selected the name...  

Meanwhile in real life I always call myself Trevor, but have no problem responding to Trev and a whole bunch of nicknames that have been assigned to me. There are exactly two people in the world who like to call me 'The Mobster' for reasons I won't go into, and I have made it clear to them that they are allowed to but no further dispensations will be granted.

And of course sometimes the matter is out of the writer's hand entirely - when I quoted glenn in a review recently I put his name in without capitals (and spelled correctly!) and my editor must have thought I just missed the shift key. I figured I would wait until glenn got back and commented on this to possibly mention it to my editor, but it sounds like I probably can just leave well enough alone...

Just for the record, my comment about not recognizing my name when it's capitalized meant "recognize" only in the visual sense. I am totally consistent about my own usage, including my business cards and email headers at work, but what other people do is up to them. When I'm in the other role, dealing with band names that have deliberate (and consistent) capitalization patterns, I try my best to respect them, so I guess that's what I'd be happiest to get from other people, but in the context of scattered casual references, I only get angry if whole letters are added or removed.  

I did, in fact, look into the question of case-sensitivity in legal names, and as best I can tell, at the moment in the US there is none. And I probably have enough other projects waiting that I will never get around to making myself a test case.

Well, my solution - which tries to balance my desire to not pointlessly offend people with my desire to respect the English language as I understand it - essentially amounts to writing "glenn" in contexts where it's a reasonable expectation that glenn might read it, and "Glenn" in contexts where such an expectation is unlikely and/or where I'd need to spend more time explaining that no, my finger didn't just slip en route to the shift key, than just capitalizing a name in the first place.  

I mean, glenn might be committed to the lower-casing - but I don't think, for example, that if a legal summons came to his door addressed to "Glenn McDonald," he'd argue that he has no obligation to respond to it since that's not his name (I don't think capitalization has any legal standing, in fact - I suspect it's more a grammatical than a legal convention).

Well, having heard that our host hardly recognizes 'Glenn' anymore, I shall make a point (until I hear otherwise) of using the lowercase spelling. Thanks for the heads-up, Steve. I hope you don't have any more tired and grumpy nights anytime soon :).

Dana, I am relieved at your thoughtful reply. Thank you. I was up pretty late when I wrote the original post, and sat staring at it for a while before actually posting it, as I expected I would be stepping on some toes. My decision-making circuits don't always work well when I'm tired and/or grumpy, and that night I was both.  

I have sent/received quite a number of emails to/from glenn over the years (though I don't claim to know him well--the emails were sporadic, and we've never met). It may be that we discussed his non-capitalization in an email, rather than my having read it in TWAS. The salient comment I recall, in paraphrase, was something like, "I don't even recognize Glenn as my name anymore." This led me to wonder if he was gritting his teeth as he looked over vF, and maybe I thought I would be playing the hero, taking arrows so that glenn wouldn't have to. It's silly to think glenn would need that kind of help, really.

Steve, I agree in principle with what you say, but I have a crisis of courtesy, you see. I knw it is discourteous to spell someone's name incorrectly, but I also feel very discourteous decapitalising a name, as though [Gg]lenn were not important enough to merit a capital letter. And many a time a person will use a word (or a style of writing) to refer to themsleves that they would not accept from anyone else -- there is even a specific term for this in sociolonguistics, but I am damned if I can remember what it is).  

Perhaps I should use the lowercase spelling. Maybe you know the man better than I do. But I did want to point out that in my recent posts, that the use of an uppercase G was considered and chosen, with the best of intentions, rather than simply used by default.

If glenn were dead and buried (sorry for the sour picture, glenn), he would be turning in his grave at how the folks on vF, presumably some of his most devoted readers, capitalize his name. I apologize if this is too venomous for some, but glenn has made the un-capitalization of his name only too clear, most recently in his furialog post of 26 May 2005.