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Further Banned Words and Phrases
Filed under: Personal Tagged: banned words and phrases, punctuation
Actually, just one today, and it’s not really a word or a phrase. It’s this: all lowercase everything all the time. You’re off the hook, E.L., a writer I know—I just decide to forgive him, because his plea for understanding of the lowercasing is a signature to all his emails, which indicates forethought and genuine regret. PK, you too can breathe easy as far as I’m concerned, since you had a well-researched esoteric-typographer rationale (remind me what/who it was so I can link to it). IMs—they call for lowercase; speed is paramount, so spare your precious bodily shift key. The occasional quickie email. Of course! Of course, me too. But real emails, which are, after all, letters, deserve real capitalization. Especially proper names. It’s all we have in the end, after all. You don’t want your headstone all lowercase, do you? I thought not.
I know this is a sensitive subject, and I expect abuse. Nevertheless, I think if you’re going to observe the conventions of sentence-writing at all, you should also use the proper capitalization that those poor elementary-school teachers ground into you till they were themselves ground down to little bits of chalk and Cheetoh dust. And if it’s a business email or an email to anyone you like even remotely, and might even want to bowl over, and you’re over the age of 17, for the love of Fowler please use apostrophes where they’re needed. You’re probably not a whimsical Modernist poet or a pioneer black feminist or so self-effacingly humble you can’t even cap “I” or a Rodeo Drive blonde on a Sidekick who doesn’t know any better (ground-down educators notwithstanding). So…enough lowercasing everything. Especially names. Just do that much for me.
Comments
I’d like my headstone all lower case! “here lies carolita johnson, she doesn’t give a damn anymore!” Heh heh heh. But people only get lowercase emails from me when I use my phone to email — too many maneouvres necessary on that little bugger to get capitals where they’re appropriate, and T9 isn’t as smart as it professes to be!
The shift key is lodged permanently with my mental command to period and start a new sentence, so this doesn’t even register as a decision any more. But it doesn’t particularly bother me when others fail to do this, though I’m not certain that it doesn’t degrade their communication in the same way as, but to a lesser extent than, misspelling common words or using shorthands like the second person u.
That said, I am slightly embarrassed to work somewhere where I’m the youngest, and the only one who capitalizes.
This one’s a tough one. Criticizing style of writing is like criticizing style of clothes. Sometimes ripped jeans are perfect. Sometimes jeans with a rip in them are so inappropriate that other people are embarassed. There’s also a case to be made about being too formal all the time (though, that’d one’s harder to defend).
But in general, I agree - it’s easy to like people with a good sense of style and easy to get annoyed with people without one.
Oh, it’s fine for poems and stuff, experimental fiction, short-short thingamabobs, song lyrics—really anything creative and self-contained. Not a choice I’d make personally, but it doesn’t bother me too much in a literary magazine or poetry blog. (Though the lowercase “i,” in the 21st century, will never be all right with me.)
No, I mean in an email conversation. And having just gotten an all-lowercase email from another dear friend who has a good reason not to overexercise the fingers, I saw that it didn’t bother me. It’s the emails from strangers, random associates, paramours, potential advertisers, friends-of-friends. There’s something overfamiliar about it that just sets me on edge, especially when used inconsistently. Maybe it’s the careless inconsistency that’s irking me. It’s like ripped, rank jeans with a ball gown over them, lumpy and baffling rather than chic.
There seems to be a kind of ‘point-counterpoint’ symmetry between your last two entries. While I sometimes like to shake things up with it, there’s no doubt how George Trow would feel about “lowercase everything all the time.†And having just read about his last years makes me kind of sad. To be so stiff and so humorlessly resistant to change rarely makes for a happy life.
Actually, I take it back: There are sometimes perfect reasons for lowercase everything all the time.
Better all lowercase than all uppercase!