Sarah Gibbard Cook
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ALL CAPS

11/4/2019

4 Comments

 
Are you YELLING at me? Are YOU yelling at ME?

Like boldface or italics, all caps in small doses lend emphasis. They're great for book covers and road signs but considered rude in email. Selectively equating all caps with shouting long predates the Internet. (“This time he shouted it out in capital letters.” Evening Star, Feb. 28, 1856.)  There’s method in the madness.

ALL CAPS go back to the ancient Romans, who used capital letters only. Early medieval scribes invented cursive and lower-case scripts for faster copying. The printing press standardized a mix of caps and lower case, with two advantages over boxy all caps. First, mixed case took less space and used less paper. Second, in long texts with high resolution, it’s easier to read. The variety of letter shapes, some dropping below the line and others rising high above it, helps the eyes distinguish whole words at a time.

​Later technologies offered less choice of fonts and cases. Teletype equipment was engineered with a single all-caps keyboard; traces remain in military, naval, and weather communications. Typewriters produced upper and lower case but not bold or italics, making capitalization the way to accentuate key words in legal documents. Ever wonder what's behind the tradition of all caps for comics? Hand lettering, ink that bleeds on cheap paper, short phrases—and smaller speech bubbles because no letters drop below the line.
4 Comments
Rebecca link
11/4/2019 02:20:56 pm

Well, Sarah, the expanse of your knowledge never ceases to amaze me. It makes a lot of sense that Cap lowercase saves space = saves money for newspapers. I wonder what changes the internet will make on how we write words. Thanks for the cool info. -Rebecca

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Sarah link
11/5/2019 08:31:43 am

Perhaps even more than the Internet, text messaging may change our writing profoundly. It will be interesting to see whether all-lower-case with abundant acronyms and minimal punctuation spreads from phones to other contexts.

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Rebecca link
11/10/2019 10:03:21 pm

Perhaps after our friends speak, we will exclusively give them a thumbs up rather than respond verbally. Happens sometimes now, may get more frequent. : )

Sarah link
11/11/2019 01:28:27 pm

Rebecca, good thought. If nothing else, social media (and restaurant or movie reviews) are standardizing the meaning of the gesture. Apparently it meant just the opposite in ancient Rome. https://time.com/4984728/thumbs-up-thumbs-down-history/ The modern positive meaning seems to date from WWI.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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