why i type in (almost) all lowercase
07 Nov 2024a few months ago, i got some feedback from a friend and colleague, Maureen, about my using all lowercase. and she made a suggestion which i am taking on now: doing some writing about why i do this and including it in my email signature. so here we are! thanks, Maureen.
at a high-level, the reason i starting doing this is because i am generally contrarian when a dominant story about something doesn’t make sense to me. i am especially resistant to logics rooted in colonial norms that seem like they make sense but actually don’t. and by colonial i mean people and cultures that are rooted in one place and then, by choice or by force, get exported, usually violently and for economic gain. this often looks like (in the language of the management center) preferences and traditions that are framed as requirements. some examples:
- the correct way to place eating utensils at a table
- the order in which to eat different types of food at a meal
- referring to humans based on their marital status (misses, miss, mister)
but to get more specific to the capitalization situation, the journey to lowercase-all-the-time stance looked like this:
for a while when i was younger (think ages 8-12), i was the grammar police. i would correct people out of what felt like a sense of obligation to help them (help them how? i think i thought i was helping them be better). i was actively proud of people referring to me as a member of the grammar police.
over my teenage years and early 20s, i realized that the ‘policing’ part of being the grammar police was not something i wanted to engage in. who was i to police someone else’s use of language?
and then the question dawned on me that i was acting as the police on someone’s behalf. so then i had to ask, who was i being the police for? and when i went down the rabbit hole of where grammar rules come from (if you have never been down it, i highly encourage it!) that was the end for me. i started playing with different types and styles of grammar just to fuck with those dudes who were inserted into my head by my schooling without my awareness.
as i aged, i just got less and less attached to the grammar i’d been taught and more aware that language worked as long as people understood each other. and that language evolved over time. and that people in different places/cultures can use the same language in different ways. i think those insights came probably some time during college or grad school.
but it was really after grad school when i switched the majority of my writing, on computer and on phone, to lowercase. i turned off all the autocapitalize settings on my devices and resolved to only use capital letters for acronyms.
i would say 95% of the time, i don’t hear any resistance to this practice. almost all the pushback i get comes from white people but there are definitely BIPOC who correct me. often the emotion that comes is confusion but sometimes it’s anger. i’ve been told by folks of all races that my lack of grammar, punctuation, and capitalization makes me seem dumb. for the most part all of this is just interesting to me but at some point i might try to make some meaning of the dynamics and patterns in the pushback.
part 2 of this post will come some day. that part will be about noticing two other black feminists, bell hooks and adrienne maree brown, writing their names and more in all lowercase.
links:
- https://stuyspec.com/article/living-in-lowercase
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/12/15/bell-hooks-real-name/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_lower_case_names_and_pseudonyms
words / writing / post-processing
606w / ??min / 3min