CAPital pleaSURE or PUNishment?

Oct 7, 2024 | Real life | 0 comments

One capital pleasure of my real life is the license my day job—English language editor for Dutch academics—gives me to goof off on Google. Or, to put it in terms the taxman will accept: the time I spend online looking up terminology is justified.

For sad nerdlings like the Bashful Blagger (aka me), badly infected with TICS (“terminally insatiable curiosity syndrome”), unravelling the hidden meanings of acronyms and other initial ISMS is more than a diversion. It is an essential life-enhancing element of my work. All of which is mere preamble to revealing what fun I had pottering in pursuit of the meaning of “CAP”.

Did you know that the Free Dictionary lists an incredible 252 definitions for CAP? (No silly, I didn’t count ’em.) The one I was looking up stands for “computer-assisted probing”. An example of this is to be found in a report about a new probe for performing brain biopsies. The developer, Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena of Imperial College London was inspired by Sirex noctilio, a wood-boring wasp that uses its ovipositor to drill into trees. The surgical probe reproduces the mechanics of the wasp’s drill (special shafts that move counter to each other) to displace and not damage tissue allowing surgeons to safely insert a hollow tube deep into the soft brain.

The wood-boring wasp, by the way, is native to the Northern Hemisphere and was introduced into my native New Zealand as well as Australia, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and South Africa. Down Under the Sirex is a real pest that attacks exotic pine plantations, causing up to 80% tree mortality.

While we’re on the subject of mortality, CAP is also “common Ada package”, a programming language developed by the US government commonly used in embedded systems (e.g. for air traffic control). Ada has nowt to do with the something-nasty-in-the-woodshed Aunt Ada Doom immortalized by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm, her comic satire of the rural novel and the funniest book I’ve ever read, first published September 8th 1932 and reprinted since then in an amazing 129 editions (howzat for popular!).

This CAPtivating woman was a pioneer in computer history. Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), a mathematician considered to be the world’s first computer programmer, was doomed to die at 37, the same age as her father, the poet Lord Byron.

A CAP you might doff your hat for (or hoodie at least) is the clever little “capuchin”. These brave New World monkeys were named after an offshoot of the Franciscan monks, the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin who wear brown robes with capacious hoods over their heads. Capuchin monkeys are extremely intelligent (the monks, too, indubitably) and are used in laboratories or kept as pets (think: organ grinders).

Some monkeys are trained to help quadriplegics around the house, much like mobility assistance dogs. They help out by doing such tasks as washing their owner’s face, and microwaving food and opening bottles. However, it seems these little helpers don’t always do well in this care-giving context as for safety reasons they often have their teeth extracted (wot?! in case they bite the hand that feeds… their owner!?) (ahem, see article under Further reading).

But enough of the monkey business and onto majuscule matters, to wit: CAP aka “uppercase”, known as such because ye olden loden setters kept capital letters in the upper drawer of a desk or in the upper type case.

Finally, StudlyCaps, aka StickyCaps is what you call it when individual letters in words are capitalized at random or in a pattern. According to the Jargon File, “The origin and significance of this practice is obscure. It appears to have been popularized among adolescent users during the early eras of online culture, as a form of rebellion against the rules for proper capitalization of names and sentences.” SO, tHere yOu havE it. WHat do You thiNk? Has reading this been a CAPital pleaSURE or PUNishment for you? Answers on a POSTcard, please.▼

Further reading

Unseen Stella Gibbons novels Cold Comfort Farm has also been filmed in TV series a couple of times. This is my favorite cover, illustrated by the New Yorker‘s Roz Chas, one of my favorite cartoonists. I never knew that Stella Gibbons also wrote some 30 other books!

Ada Lovelace and the Analytical Engine Google her name and you’ll find many more articles on this fascinating genius

Capuchin monkeys spotted eating infant in rare act of cannibalism Published in New Scientist; it must be true

The Jargon File For wordlovers, it’s well worth having a rummage through this comprehensive compendium of hacker slang

CAPtions aka photo credits

Wasp: Sirex noctilio by Milan Zúbrik
Portrait of Ada Lovelace by Margaret Carpenter, 1836
Monkey by JamesTung/Getty Images
Upper and lower case types by Maggie McCain

Featured image: Letters of the Williamsburg 18th century press by Doug Coldwell

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