For experimental purposes only, I wanted to test the frequency of capital letters adorning products. Accordingly, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve arrayed a dozen items in front of me to test the theory.<\/p>\n
My belief is that most people overuse capital letters, LIKE THIS. And they like to play with exclamations marks as well!!!!!<\/p>\n
But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to hear anything or anybody when everyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s shouting.<\/p>\n
Let me explain:<\/p>\n
I chose 12 items: a can of Cheetos, a bottle of V-8, a book, a DVD cover, my laptop computer, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Complete Idiot\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Guide to Learning Danish,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the Dex phone book, a crossword puzzle magazine, a globe, a jar of kosher dills, a box of kitchen matches and a political ad that arrived weeks late.<\/p>\n
What do the randomly selected items have in common? Ten of the 12 use all capital letters that scream out at us. Are those who choose the lettering on these products first cousins of used-car salesmen who hawk their wares on late-night TV by shouting each word?<\/p>\n
And if it weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t for having been reminded of the universal rule that sentences start with a capital letter, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d use even fewer caps.<\/p>\n
But even when habit, training and instinct compel me to follow the rule of beginning sentences with capitals, I come across e-mail addresses entirely in lower case letters. And because e-mail addresses are \u00e2\u20ac\u0153case sensitive,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tough always to type the correct address.<\/p>\n
I believe the rationale for many people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hyper inflammation of the alphabet comes from the notion that a larger letter gives importance to communication and by extension, anything in all caps means it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s extremely important. Size matters.<\/p>\n
Capital letters are ugly, predictable and similarly sized. Notice how much easier it is to make out Interstate signs that use big and small letters to identify cities. For example, the individual configurations of letters like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153i\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcl\u00e2\u20ac\u009d make it easier for motorists to discern \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bernalillo\u00e2\u20ac\u009d than if it were BERNALILLO. And Las Vegas is much more readable than LAS VEGAS.<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the ascenders and descenders, the curlicues and loops, the whorls and twirls that give letters individuality and personality.<\/p>\n
The only thing worse than having to read an e-mail address in all caps, for example, is deciphering words that mix the majuscule and the minuscules incorrectly.<\/p>\n
For example, many hand-painted otherwise all-caps signs around town dot the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d regardless of whether it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s capital or small, and play loose with the letter \u00e2\u20ac\u0153L,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d like this: SiX lOVElY KiTTENS FOR SAlE.<\/p>\n
But rather than turn this into a treatise on proper construction of the alphabet, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s consider the tiniest letter in the alphabet, which also happens to be one of the most common.<\/p>\n
In a recent article in the New York Times, columnist Caroline Winter wrote that the capital \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for which \u00e2\u20ac\u0153there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no grammatical reason,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d appears only in English.<\/p>\n
And what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the reason for all this I-strain? Egotism? Winter mentions that languages like Hebrew and Arabic have no capitalized letters at all, and in some regions, even the Japanese virtually drop pronouns altogether.<\/p>\n
And why does English capitalize no other pronouns? In Spanish, we get along quite well with the unobtrusive \u00e2\u20ac\u0153yo,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in lower case, for the first-person reference.<\/p>\n
Winter adds that even the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153supposedly snobbish French leave all pronouns in the unassuming lowercase.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
One belief about the existence of the capital \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is that in the middle ages, when monks transcribed the classics, the first-person pronoun was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and even \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ich,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but when the first letter broke away, it simply couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stand alone, uncapitalized, even if \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a\u00e2\u20ac\u009d somehow survived.<\/p>\n
Could the capital \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u009d provide even more justification for calling this the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Generation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? And does the overuse of the word reflect our egos? Media research took a tally of the use of the first-person pronoun in of post-primary election speeches delivered by Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
The idea was to determine whether particular language patterns demonstrate cases of political self-inflation. Clinton used \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 64 times, compared with 60 for McCain and 30 for Obama. According to the Times columnist, Obama \u00e2\u20ac\u0153was the only candidate whose combined use of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcwe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcyou\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 outnumbered the use of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
So what do these numbers prove? That the terrorists will win, or maybe not?<\/p>\n
A Google search of the upper-case \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u009d yields speculation all the way from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153because \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is\/am important\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to the fear a small \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u009d would get lost in medieval handwritten manuscripts.<\/p>\n
As English became what it is today, it took many detours. And whether the capital \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u009d reflects self-esteem or any of myriad theories about orthography, it might be of interest to try this:<\/p>\n
Switch the form of address when you write someone by capitalizing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and by using the lower case \u00e2\u20ac\u0153i\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when we refer to ourselves. It can be humbling; i\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m feeling the humility already and i hope You are too.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Try this experiment:<\/p>\n
Using a nickel, determine how many masculine and feminine names appear on both sides. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s permissible to add the last letter of one word to the beginning letters of the following words, but you may not skip or switch letters.<\/p>\n
The proper names need to be common spellings, nothing exotic. A clue: The name \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ted\u00e2\u20ac\u009d appears on the back side, as part of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153UniTED.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d How many other names can you find?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For experimental purposes only, I wanted to test the frequency of capital letters adorning products. Accordingly, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve arrayed a dozen items in front of me to test the theory. My belief is that most people overuse capital letters, LIKE THIS. And they like to play with exclamations marks as well!!!!! But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to hear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1680,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions\/1680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}