Suckerfish on the Side of Your Whale

Normally I assume small letters, however, our authentication system allows users to use capitals in the password. In one case, a customer asked repeatedly for "small caps". It went something like this:

"That's small caps"
"Uh... Small letters and capital letters are different things. Did you want small letters or capital letters?"
"Small caps"
"No, it has to be one or the other. Which did you want?"
"Small caps"
"Small caps are when you have capital letters that have had the size scaled down. You can't type those. Small letters are also referred to as lowercase letters. Capital letters are big letters, also referred to as uppercase letters. Your only choices are 'small' or 'capital'. Which would you like?"

To help you appreciate just how absurd this is, I've invented a similar conversation:

"Would you like fries with that?"
"Yes no."
"Uh... Is that a yes or a no?"
"Yes no"
"Sir, you have to choose one of them"
"Yes no"
"No, you don't get it. 'Yes' is an affirmative response, 'no' is a negative response, and according to the law of the excluded middle, you can't respond with both!" *clerk's head explodes*

Clearly the customer is a master of Zen Buddhism and/or logical systems with more than 2 truth values. Or perhaps he actually wanted SMALL CAPS. Though this would of course make you wonder how he planned to type the password.

If you've learned to speak idiot by now, you may accurately have concluded by now that it was neither of the above. He wanted small letters. The worst part is that I've heard multiple people refer to small letters as small caps. Now I'm not normally too picky about mistakes creeping into the public lexicon, but seriously... Can we TRY to keep out mistakes that directly contradict the proper meaning? Or is it just that we "could care less"? Sigh.