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Hopefully the Linguistics Stack Exchange is the best place to ask my question.

The opening credits of a cartoon called Gerald Mc Boing Boing uses cursive. To me, it looks like lowercase "b"s are used for "Boing Boing". However, the cartoon was released in 1950. Has the way cursive "b"s are written changed since then?

The following screenshots are all from the opening credits of the short. Notice how several "B"s are capitalized differently from the way "Boing Boing" is written.

How would a 1950s audience have interpreted the capitalization?

screenshot 1 screenshot 2 screenshot 3 screenshot 4

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    It seems to have nothing to do with cursive, just a regular lowercase "b". Check this answer at English.SE. It says: In names of Irish descent, sometimes the owners insist on no second capital, unlike Gaelic ones. The very next answer says, Some Scottish surnames do not have a capital.
    – Be Brave Be Like Ukraine
    Commented May 15, 2015 at 20:30
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not about linugistics at all.
    – Sir Cornflakes
    Commented Dec 30, 2016 at 15:01

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They're regular lowercase bs, just like the ones in "Gail Kubik" and "Herb Klynn" and "John Hubley." Why would anyone think they're an uppercase form? Plenty of "Mc" names can be written with the second part lowercased - you'll find "Mcdonald" alongside "McDonald."

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  • I should have come at this from the perspective of what was written, rather than the handwriting. That would have given me a similar answer. I did not know that about names not having a second capital letter. I thought they might be a heavily-stylized uppercase "B" because other cartoons in this series do have stylized (yet instantly legible) title cards. Also, every site on the Internet capitalizes the title, so I thought there must be a reason.
    – Atomic Tripod
    Commented May 16, 2015 at 13:30

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