Johnson | The exclamation mark

Yum! no more

Some over-clever brand names pose a conundrum for style-book editors

By R.L.G. | NEW YORK

THIS week, our colleague in Shanghai reports the travails of Yum! Brands in China. A Chinese television station claimed that there are dangerous levels of antibiotics in KFC's chicken there. KFC (formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken) is owned by Yum!, as are Taco Bell and Pizza Hut.

But that article, and this blog post, will mark our last discussion of Yum! Brands. Not that we won't write about the company, but our style editor has ruled that we will no longer give the company its exclamation mark in writing about it. Yum Brands it is, from now on. This will also affect Yahoo(!).

Companies have a variety of ways of making their names a conundrum for style editors. They may insist on an initial lower-case letter, like eBay, leaving the question of whether to capitalise it at the beginning of a sentence, always, or never. They may have internal capitals, like BlackBerry. They may have a mix of practices of their own: PricewaterhouseCoopers does not capitalise the Waterhouse but it does Coopers (This reflects the old Price Waterhouse, which merged with Coopers & Lybrand. Poor Lybrand got left out entirely.) The firm's logo is all lower-case (pwc), but they ask journalists to write PwC, and they abbreviate it as such themselves. Exxon Mobil Corporation is the parent of a company called ExxonMobil. Complicated stuff. The companies' flacks and lawyers may insist that journalists write their names they way they do, but editors are more or less free to rule otherwise. A list of company names as we render them appears in our stye guide here.

The Economist's principles are to call people and countries what they would like to be called, and to show respect at all times. But another core value is clear traditional writing. Tricks like an exclamation mark in a name arrest the eye—which is why companies do it. But we would rather try to catch eyes with the quality of our writing and analysis, without distraction. Sometimes the best we can do is compromise. So BlackBerry it is, but also Yum and Yahoo from now on.

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