Maybe when Gen Z's started saying "no cap," they took it too literally.
To me the main issue is that it calls attention to itself without a clear reason except to distract (or as you say, to perform), and that's not what you want to do as a writer--have your punctuation take the light away from your work.
“Capitals are color; commas are contour; cadence is light and shadow. Strip them away and you desaturate reality. Use lowercase when it means something—poetry, character voice, deliberate constraint. Otherwise, let language breathe in full color.”
The idea of looking at language as colour never struck with me before as much as it did while reading this piece. I never really understood the lowercase trend of writing, outside of specific kinds of writing, and I couldn’t explain why I didn’t really like it as much, but you articulated it perfectly, it’s dull, void of meaning most times, and as I think about it now, void of colour. Such a beautiful and important thing to consider. Thank you.
(Also I’m Canadian so we write it as “colour” as my response shows lol)
I just learned yesterday that the powers that be (whoever they are) are trying to eliminate the semicolon; and everyone knows the world needs more colons. Leave it alone!
“Mortar matters. A house with cracks, cannot stand.” I’m not sure—-been watching a lot of videos recently on some ancient Chinese Japanese, and even Egyptian construction techniques. As an example, weren’t the pyramids built without mortar, just by accurate block stacking.? That works great for retaining walls too. Maybe lowercase serves only as a counterpoint to uppercase; the Germans capitalize all nouns, we only proper ones. But what’s the use of clogging our letter system with twice as many characters as necessary? 52 letters instead of 26.? Ain’t copacetic! Let’s kill the letter c while we are at it and replace it with a k on the hard and an s on the suave. Now we are down to 25. Har har. Keep ‘em coming, Tom. Food for thought is the best! (Because it does not pack on the pounds).
I have noticed this trend creeping up, and yes, it is annoying and quite dumb! Glad to see you put some words to the trend...
Amen! It drives me nuts.
Good God, thank you.
Maybe when Gen Z's started saying "no cap," they took it too literally.
To me the main issue is that it calls attention to itself without a clear reason except to distract (or as you say, to perform), and that's not what you want to do as a writer--have your punctuation take the light away from your work.
“Capitals are color; commas are contour; cadence is light and shadow. Strip them away and you desaturate reality. Use lowercase when it means something—poetry, character voice, deliberate constraint. Otherwise, let language breathe in full color.”
The idea of looking at language as colour never struck with me before as much as it did while reading this piece. I never really understood the lowercase trend of writing, outside of specific kinds of writing, and I couldn’t explain why I didn’t really like it as much, but you articulated it perfectly, it’s dull, void of meaning most times, and as I think about it now, void of colour. Such a beautiful and important thing to consider. Thank you.
(Also I’m Canadian so we write it as “colour” as my response shows lol)
Thanks so much for your kind words! The perks of synesthesia :).
I agree with all this, but to be fair ALL CAPS is even worse.
Very true.
I just learned yesterday that the powers that be (whoever they are) are trying to eliminate the semicolon; and everyone knows the world needs more colons. Leave it alone!
They can pry the semicolon from my cold, dead, carpal-tunnel-racked fingers!
“Mortar matters. A house with cracks, cannot stand.” I’m not sure—-been watching a lot of videos recently on some ancient Chinese Japanese, and even Egyptian construction techniques. As an example, weren’t the pyramids built without mortar, just by accurate block stacking.? That works great for retaining walls too. Maybe lowercase serves only as a counterpoint to uppercase; the Germans capitalize all nouns, we only proper ones. But what’s the use of clogging our letter system with twice as many characters as necessary? 52 letters instead of 26.? Ain’t copacetic! Let’s kill the letter c while we are at it and replace it with a k on the hard and an s on the suave. Now we are down to 25. Har har. Keep ‘em coming, Tom. Food for thought is the best! (Because it does not pack on the pounds).