I WAS IN THE MILITARY FOR 6 YEARS AND ALL THE PAPERWORK WE WROTE OUT HAD TO BE ALL CAPS. PRIOR TO I WROTE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON BUT THIS HAS STUCK WITH ME AND NOW ITS HABIT. HOPE THAT CLEARS IT UP
20, maybe more. We were doing this on writers' forums in 2003 to perform disaffection, dry irony and "cool" online. I lapsed out of it gradually over the next decade or so but it's still a habit I sometimes don't bother shaking...
I don't even think it's necessarily modern, poets have been doing it for a century or more and I bet it was a style choice in the days of bulletin boards, SMS and IRC.
yeah like, "all lowercase" is basically millennial "cool" nerd or lit(erary) kid typing style, definitely happened on IRC a lot. you even see some tech CEOs type in it today
> yeah like, "all lowercase" is basically millennial "cool" nerd or lit(erary) kid typing style, definitely happened on IRC a lot.
Oh god, the dorks that used the same proper capitalization and punctuation in an informal and conversational chat like IRC as they did for their college papers stuck out like a sore thumb and were just usually the most onerous and exhausting people.
i feel like the article might be overanalyzing the phenomenon a little bit. at least among my peers we all just turned autocapitalization off sometime during middle school and didn’t look back. (when it comes to social media and texting).
i think lowercase works well on short form social media but wouldn’t use it for anything longer than a few paragraphs, because it does grate after a while.
I think you may be underselling it. It's not purely mechanistic - I also have autocaps turned off on my phone, but my messages aren't all lowercase. From my perspective it's so natural to manually capitalize that if I want to write all lowercase I'm typing at half speed.
I think this line from the article sums it up best.
> i’ve heard of people my age who “become lowercase” because capital letters in texts and dating apps read as “too intense.”
You kind of hint at this as well (except in reverse) about lowercase getting grating for long form writing. The way you write is ultimately a sort of social signal, kind of like the way you dress, or the register/dialect you use when you speak. And what is appropriate to which context depends largely on your specific social circle.
For example, you see all lowercase as acceptable for short form, but not for long form. But for some people, it's also acceptable for long form. And for some people it's not acceptable for either.
“too intense” or too old? When comes to text messages, capital letters are a older people thing, kids will tell you that. So, some people adopt lowercase to “sound” young.
pretty sure it was the consistency. and i mean sure but that’s not what the article goes into (except for the bit about uppercase being classified as too intense). i wish the author had discussed the resematicization aspect a little bit more because i think that’s key. any percieved meaning of typing in lowercase has changed over time. typing in lowercase has a long history, is popular on tumblr, apparently people think it’s anticapitalist (lol), but the vast majority of people that do it are mostly influenced by who they communicate with rather than ascribing any meaning to the style itself.
but that’s just my perspective. it’s only on reddit that i even remember typing in lowercase is not the social media norm. 🤷♀️
I have heaps of Gen Z’s in my team at work who all use it and heaps of people have had words with me about their poor communication style.
If you want to use it in your personal life, that’s cool, but in a business setting unfortunately it looks sloppy and careless.
The thing that’s crazy to me is the effort they have to go to to alter the business’ settings to make that happen, which means it’s not only an aesthetic choice, but one that makes them look bad unintentionally.
We’ve gone from careless with Boomers, to uptight and neurotic with Millennials, back to careless again. The only generation that seems to have found an uncontroversial style is Gen X, lol
I think even for business it can be dependent on context. For a full email, proper capitalization is usually expected and what I personally use. But if I'm on my laptop sending a quick teams message to someone, about half the time it's all lowercase
definitely agree! my emails are ultra professional but almost all my comms go through slack and it’s all lower case with a few choice emojis all the way. i work in a creative/social media based industry with like 150 people working under me. we keep it business casual.
This annoying VC investor in the start up I was at used to do all lowercase and bad grammar. Like bro you went to MIT, you can write properly. It’s not a vibe, you’re almost 50 years old!!
i cannot believe we are earnestly asking the etymologynerd, but his answer is very befitting (i really, strongly think the guy is a complete n utter hack.)
it's casual, the internet is casual now. there's no need for an answer of "to prove they're not ai", like what? such a thing flat-out ignores the history of the internet. ive done it for 27 years because i got on the net as a kid, many, many ppl on ebaumsworld, on BBSes, gamefaq, runescape, etc. were beginning to type like this, it's long-past ARPANET times. it's also lazy, people ARE lazy online now (see the rise of LLMs even for reading things n crafting online responses.) many people started on pc's; switching to phone, everything u wrote was suddenly getting capitalized, u could very easily tell when someone was on a phone. now, they pick up n adapt to heuristics much better.
u also had things like a whole generation of "Grammar Nazis" making typing properly explicitly uncool. many, many ppl had forum banners decrying the Grammar Nazis reign of terror. ofc, zoomers skipped this, but still, i think it lives in some sort of mimetic way. mimetics are huge, theyve never been more powerful. Y2K aesthetics are huge, n virtually everyone on myspace n livejournal was typing like this. maybe it just caught on randomly from some influencers n grew?
we can point out any number of things, but a more correct interpretation not covered in contrarianism or "oo... bet u didn't consider THIS lil number..." (wow, thanks...) will spin back towards mimetics (prob a splash of Y2K hauntology too,) which can be very hard to trace reliably.
I turned off all the auto-complete and auto formatting on my phone a couple years ago. I found it annoying to be halfway through typing a word and then having a completely different word (with a different meaning) suddenly appear in its place.
After OpenAI started marketing their bullshit for everyday people and insisting that every product include it, it got way fucking worse.
Iv done it for a long time, refusing to write my name with a capital for eg - some twisted idea that the most accessible path to self transcendence is self depreciation. (I have grown a bit less ideological since that time tho)
Very much agree with cringe and try-hard. I think about Olivia Rodrigo, whose music I really do like, and how she’s just released her third album in a row with all lowercase song titles. One album, fine. Three?! It doesn’t feel carefree and cool at that point, just performative
Octogenarian I correspond with writes in all lower case. This is just rejection of authority, happens all the time to all generations. What are the grammer rules to me?
I’d be interested to see how this translates (pun intended) to other languages, like do Germans deliberately drop their far higher proportion of capitals to ape the style? I work with a lot of Dutch speakers and they are much more likely to send “formal” work emails in lowercase than any of my English native colleagues, but I also work with a lot of Indian people and there’s a hyperformality to their communication that feels much more obvious.
i think a far more simple explanation is the same reason i do it. it started out as a trend and then people naturally begin to type like the people they talk to. my friends used lowercase so i picked it up, their friends used lowercase so they picked it, their friends used lowercase so they picked it up and so on and so forth.
I sometimes do it when texting certain people or when writing Instagram captions as an aesthetic/mood sort of thing…but my default is always to use proper capitalization. I find it astonishing that there are people who think it appropriate to forgo capitalization anytime and all the time!
This is neither new nor a good article. Heck even the Red Army Faction wrote their communiqués all lower-case, and that was in the 70s. But at least they had an intellectually coherent reason for it.
can't read the article and the archive link isn't loading for me.
but personally, i don't get ya'll attributing it to laziness. does it really take that much effort for ya'll to press the shift key every 10-15 words?
for me, well, i can't say i really care about following the conventions of grammar on the internet unless i need to come off as "professional" or whatever. i just like think lowercase letters look nice, i guess lol.
i turned my autocaps off when i was 13 on twitter and tumblr. i am 28 now and it is still my default- i genuinely don’t know if ill ever turn it back on.
ambidextrousalpaca | 20 hours ago
THE CASE FOR UPPERCASE: A CERTAIN KIND OF PERSON WRITES IN ALL CAPS NOW. WHY?
diffluere | 18 hours ago
ARCHITECTS / INTERIOR DESIGNERS. IT LOOKS BETTER ON DRAWINGS OK??
ambidextrousalpaca | 17 hours ago
I HEAR YOU
Chief_Kief | 17 hours ago
WHAT?
aisy0317 | 9 hours ago
Omfg I work in interiors and I am deceased at this comment
diffluere | 9 hours ago
DECEASED!? BUT THOSE REDLINES ARE DUE BY EOD TODAY!
DESIGNER SHALL RESURRECT AND GET BACK TO WORK IMMEDIATELY.
SaintOrJannikSinner | 9 hours ago
MY GRAND FATHER WAS A DRAFTSMAN AND THAT'S WHERE I PICKED UP THE HABIT OF WRITING THINGS IN UPPER CASE.
WillingnessFinal1411 | 14 hours ago
AND WE ALSO INVENTED CURSIVE ALL CAPS
xiandgaf | 15 hours ago
LeT’s CoMpRoMiSe
thefaehost | 11 hours ago
I AM YELLING CARL
jungleass98 | 7 hours ago
I WAS IN THE MILITARY FOR 6 YEARS AND ALL THE PAPERWORK WE WROTE OUT HAD TO BE ALL CAPS. PRIOR TO I WROTE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON BUT THIS HAS STUCK WITH ME AND NOW ITS HABIT. HOPE THAT CLEARS IT UP
EDIT: IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE MORE LEGIBLE
BettyKat7 | 12 hours ago
Meet us over at r/oldpeoplefacebook to find out more 😜
SaintOrJannikSinner | 7 hours ago
GOBBLESS
BettyKat7 | 2 hours ago
HELEN I WAS NOT TALKING TO YOU I DID ALREADY SEND YOU THE CASROLE RECIPE YOU ASKED FOR
lethifolded | 21 hours ago
The article was a lot about nothing unfortunately
immaterialgrl | 21 hours ago
i feel like this article is 10 years too late
jeremy-o | 16 hours ago
20, maybe more. We were doing this on writers' forums in 2003 to perform disaffection, dry irony and "cool" online. I lapsed out of it gradually over the next decade or so but it's still a habit I sometimes don't bother shaking...
I don't even think it's necessarily modern, poets have been doing it for a century or more and I bet it was a style choice in the days of bulletin boards, SMS and IRC.
creamyhorror | 16 hours ago
yeah like, "all lowercase" is basically millennial "cool" nerd or lit(erary) kid typing style, definitely happened on IRC a lot. you even see some tech CEOs type in it today
thefaehost | 11 hours ago
It’s how I typed on MySpace
SaintOrJannikSinner | 6 hours ago
> yeah like, "all lowercase" is basically millennial "cool" nerd or lit(erary) kid typing style, definitely happened on IRC a lot.
Oh god, the dorks that used the same proper capitalization and punctuation in an informal and conversational chat like IRC as they did for their college papers stuck out like a sore thumb and were just usually the most onerous and exhausting people.
XelaNiba | 8 hours ago
e.e. cummings would like a word. Or maybe a stanza or two.
catnip_varnish | 17 hours ago
That's what I was thinking. Probably even more
Felixir-the-Cat | 21 hours ago
Tumblr
gaymilfappreciator | 21 hours ago
i feel like the article might be overanalyzing the phenomenon a little bit. at least among my peers we all just turned autocapitalization off sometime during middle school and didn’t look back. (when it comes to social media and texting).
i think lowercase works well on short form social media but wouldn’t use it for anything longer than a few paragraphs, because it does grate after a while.
Calavar | 17 hours ago
I think you may be underselling it. It's not purely mechanistic - I also have autocaps turned off on my phone, but my messages aren't all lowercase. From my perspective it's so natural to manually capitalize that if I want to write all lowercase I'm typing at half speed.
I think this line from the article sums it up best.
> i’ve heard of people my age who “become lowercase” because capital letters in texts and dating apps read as “too intense.”
You kind of hint at this as well (except in reverse) about lowercase getting grating for long form writing. The way you write is ultimately a sort of social signal, kind of like the way you dress, or the register/dialect you use when you speak. And what is appropriate to which context depends largely on your specific social circle.
For example, you see all lowercase as acceptable for short form, but not for long form. But for some people, it's also acceptable for long form. And for some people it's not acceptable for either.
PauloPatricio | 46 minutes ago
“too intense” or too old? When comes to text messages, capital letters are a older people thing, kids will tell you that. So, some people adopt lowercase to “sound” young.
Infinite_Spring_3564 | 13 hours ago
But why did you turn it off in the first place?
gaymilfappreciator | 10 hours ago
like any middle schooler, because my friends did and i liked the way it looked. 😭
kiwistarbaby | 3 hours ago
okay but why did you like the way it looked? that's the point of the introspection and examination.
gaymilfappreciator | 7 minutes ago
pretty sure it was the consistency. and i mean sure but that’s not what the article goes into (except for the bit about uppercase being classified as too intense). i wish the author had discussed the resematicization aspect a little bit more because i think that’s key. any percieved meaning of typing in lowercase has changed over time. typing in lowercase has a long history, is popular on tumblr, apparently people think it’s anticapitalist (lol), but the vast majority of people that do it are mostly influenced by who they communicate with rather than ascribing any meaning to the style itself.
but that’s just my perspective. it’s only on reddit that i even remember typing in lowercase is not the social media norm. 🤷♀️
FatCopsRunning | 12 hours ago
I wrote in all lowercase on my live journal in 2003…
Apathin | 20 hours ago
I have heaps of Gen Z’s in my team at work who all use it and heaps of people have had words with me about their poor communication style.
If you want to use it in your personal life, that’s cool, but in a business setting unfortunately it looks sloppy and careless.
The thing that’s crazy to me is the effort they have to go to to alter the business’ settings to make that happen, which means it’s not only an aesthetic choice, but one that makes them look bad unintentionally.
We’ve gone from careless with Boomers, to uptight and neurotic with Millennials, back to careless again. The only generation that seems to have found an uncontroversial style is Gen X, lol
arawnsd | 11 hours ago
Gen X just doesn’t care enough to bother with putting in the effort to be weird for the sake of it.
lethifolded | 20 hours ago
I think even for business it can be dependent on context. For a full email, proper capitalization is usually expected and what I personally use. But if I'm on my laptop sending a quick teams message to someone, about half the time it's all lowercase
justalilgatita | 20 hours ago
definitely agree! my emails are ultra professional but almost all my comms go through slack and it’s all lower case with a few choice emojis all the way. i work in a creative/social media based industry with like 150 people working under me. we keep it business casual.
seiryuu-abi | 21 hours ago
Twitter and Tumblr lol. I could never do it.
bHLH-protein | 18 hours ago
This annoying VC investor in the start up I was at used to do all lowercase and bad grammar. Like bro you went to MIT, you can write properly. It’s not a vibe, you’re almost 50 years old!!
xiandgaf | 15 hours ago
You should read the Epstein email dump, all these fucks write like children. I think it’s deliberate, it’s a flex.
bHLH-protein | 9 hours ago
I actually saw that and it triggered me.
Underzenith17 | 21 hours ago
It predates both twitter and tumblr.
seiryuu-abi | 20 hours ago
I know but it’s where I see it the most.
WaitYourTern | 21 hours ago
I feel guilty and hypocritical when I don't capitalize. (Am English teacher has to walk the walk.)
AlexandriaLitehouse | 20 hours ago
ee cummings is rolling over in his grave rn
GrayHairLikeClaire | 21 hours ago
Can confidently say it’s a tone thing. it’s a way of communicating tone in written language. so it goes.
ShacoinaBox | 21 hours ago
i cannot believe we are earnestly asking the etymologynerd, but his answer is very befitting (i really, strongly think the guy is a complete n utter hack.)
it's casual, the internet is casual now. there's no need for an answer of "to prove they're not ai", like what? such a thing flat-out ignores the history of the internet. ive done it for 27 years because i got on the net as a kid, many, many ppl on ebaumsworld, on BBSes, gamefaq, runescape, etc. were beginning to type like this, it's long-past ARPANET times. it's also lazy, people ARE lazy online now (see the rise of LLMs even for reading things n crafting online responses.) many people started on pc's; switching to phone, everything u wrote was suddenly getting capitalized, u could very easily tell when someone was on a phone. now, they pick up n adapt to heuristics much better.
u also had things like a whole generation of "Grammar Nazis" making typing properly explicitly uncool. many, many ppl had forum banners decrying the Grammar Nazis reign of terror. ofc, zoomers skipped this, but still, i think it lives in some sort of mimetic way. mimetics are huge, theyve never been more powerful. Y2K aesthetics are huge, n virtually everyone on myspace n livejournal was typing like this. maybe it just caught on randomly from some influencers n grew?
we can point out any number of things, but a more correct interpretation not covered in contrarianism or "oo... bet u didn't consider THIS lil number..." (wow, thanks...) will spin back towards mimetics (prob a splash of Y2K hauntology too,) which can be very hard to trace reliably.
Legitimate-Week7885 | 21 hours ago
i do this. i can safely say its pure laziness. yes i'm too lazy to hit the shift button. i do use capitals when i write by hand though.
big-dal-tex | 21 hours ago
Doesn’t your phone auto capitalize?
Edit: you’re prob on desktop
Key-Level-4072 | 21 hours ago
I turned off all the auto-complete and auto formatting on my phone a couple years ago. I found it annoying to be halfway through typing a word and then having a completely different word (with a different meaning) suddenly appear in its place.
After OpenAI started marketing their bullshit for everyday people and insisting that every product include it, it got way fucking worse.
Legitimate-Week7885 | 21 hours ago
i'm on my macbook but like key-level-4072, i turn off all my autocorrect, etc on my phone. my mistakes are my own.
sea-lass-1072 | 21 hours ago
as a non capital user, i turned off auto-caps on my phone lol. but will use them in convo during conversations with like, my landlord
nickersb83 | 19 hours ago
Iv done it for a long time, refusing to write my name with a capital for eg - some twisted idea that the most accessible path to self transcendence is self depreciation. (I have grown a bit less ideological since that time tho)
_Fizzgiggy | 19 hours ago
I can’t read things right unless it’s properly spelled and mostly grammatically correct.
I can still read but it flows weird in my mind
Beamed_Up_Scotty | 18 hours ago
I did this, and then I turned 27
5x0uf5o | 10 hours ago
It's cringe and try-hard. The bands that have lowercased their name and song titles will regret it in a few years, I think.
justalittlestupid | 8 hours ago
Very much agree with cringe and try-hard. I think about Olivia Rodrigo, whose music I really do like, and how she’s just released her third album in a row with all lowercase song titles. One album, fine. Three?! It doesn’t feel carefree and cool at that point, just performative
farfel00 | 15 hours ago
Octogenarian I correspond with writes in all lower case. This is just rejection of authority, happens all the time to all generations. What are the grammer rules to me?
moriartygotswag | 14 hours ago
I’d be interested to see how this translates (pun intended) to other languages, like do Germans deliberately drop their far higher proportion of capitals to ape the style? I work with a lot of Dutch speakers and they are much more likely to send “formal” work emails in lowercase than any of my English native colleagues, but I also work with a lot of Indian people and there’s a hyperformality to their communication that feels much more obvious.
screwthbeatles | 21 hours ago
archive?
anchovy345 | 21 hours ago
https://archive.ph/dDFec
big-dal-tex | 21 hours ago
i see what u did there
zipiddydooda | 20 hours ago
A certain kind of person…who sucks.
ornamentaIhermit | 20 hours ago
i think a far more simple explanation is the same reason i do it. it started out as a trend and then people naturally begin to type like the people they talk to. my friends used lowercase so i picked it up, their friends used lowercase so they picked it, their friends used lowercase so they picked it up and so on and so forth.
DollarThrill | 19 hours ago
The article spends too long looking for deep meaning or a root cause. It’s just pure laziness.
areyouokeddie | 18 hours ago
I think of bell hooks
radiocreature | 21 hours ago
for people who can spell autocorrect is annoying asf
pearlsandprejudice | 10 hours ago
I sometimes do it when texting certain people or when writing Instagram captions as an aesthetic/mood sort of thing…but my default is always to use proper capitalization. I find it astonishing that there are people who think it appropriate to forgo capitalization anytime and all the time!
Ooficus | 2 hours ago
it’s because caps are for capitalist
/s
considerlilies | 16 hours ago
personally, I call it my tumblr accent (I do capitalize I but that's it)
MrGnu | 16 hours ago
This is neither new nor a good article. Heck even the Red Army Faction wrote their communiqués all lower-case, and that was in the 70s. But at least they had an intellectually coherent reason for it.
Equivalent-Bid-1176 | 21 hours ago
i feel stupider for knowing about this.
bath_grenade | 15 hours ago
i'm either making a political statement or i'm just lazy, i no longer remember why i type like this
pinkbootstrap | 19 hours ago
I think its cute sometimes
triumphofthecommons | 20 hours ago
the funny thing is i write in all caps.
KennyBrusselsprouts | 5 hours ago
can't read the article and the archive link isn't loading for me.
but personally, i don't get ya'll attributing it to laziness. does it really take that much effort for ya'll to press the shift key every 10-15 words?
for me, well, i can't say i really care about following the conventions of grammar on the internet unless i need to come off as "professional" or whatever. i just like think lowercase letters look nice, i guess lol.
caribou227 | 5 hours ago
i turned my autocaps off when i was 13 on twitter and tumblr. i am 28 now and it is still my default- i genuinely don’t know if ill ever turn it back on.
ScalyDestiny | 19 hours ago
When I'm tired I couldn't care less about reaching for that shift key.
BisforBands | 15 hours ago
On LinkedIn they do it because they somehow think it won't appear AI written