easyJet or Eastjet?

Recently, back before the Carolean era so formally started, I received an email. Thank you for the coverage in a national newspaper, it politely said, but would you mind getting the mention corrected online so that our client’s name is written with its preferred format of lower-case and (mostly) capital letters? Otherwise, it continued, we know the client will be upset when we alert them to said article.

Right. Okay. There are various things to say here.

Firstly, I seriously struggle to believe any client would not prefer to have a mention in a national broadsheet, even if un-ideally capitalised, than not at all. Should anyone reading this have such a client, they should immediately take them to the asylum for a check-up — or, failing that, dump them.

Second, you will almost never get a publication to make such a change. Partly that’s because changes tend to be faffingly time-consuming, and thus frowned upon, and thus only likely in the event of an egregiousXX error. In this case, it’s also because, actually, there is no error. What you are seeing is simply your client’s name deliberately written as per the publication’s Style Guide.

Every publication has a Style Guide; many are astonishingly complex, and some run to tens of pages. And said Style Guides are always the last word. So if — as most do — they dictate that company names shall be capitalised, with upper case first letters and otherwise-lower-case letters, then they damn well will be. The airline is very welcome to call itself easyJet, but we’re calling it Easyjet and that’s final. Etc etc.

In other words, there’s no getting this changed. You’re better off explaining to clients with pesky names (or peskily-named brands or products) that they’re mostly not going to have those pesky names reproduced as such in the press, and that they’d just better get used to it. It’s out of their hands, and out of yours.

It’s out of mine too, as a freelancer. In the event of this pre-Carolean email, I advised the sender that they were better off contacting the newspaper in question directly, and speaking to the digital team, for that is where the change would be accomplished. I also advised them not to do so — to choose their battles, and not choose this probably-unwinnable one.