Capital Punishment

The New York Times reported recently that the National Weather Service has decided to stop yelling at us, at least typographically. FLOODING will now be flooding, and 9.2 ON THE RICHTER SCALE will be smaller, if only in appearance.

In the digital world, all caps are important for writing code, but the long-familiar convention may be becoming less welcome in journalism. It’s certainly not the way to make friends on email.

Capital letters are, of course, a boon to legibility, and have been since antiquity.  The Romans’ triumphal arches proclaimed  their boasts quite nicely in all-uppercase  announcements.

In modern times, all caps are the register of headlines. The president of the United States never recovered from the paraphrastic headline FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD, which memorably graced the cover of the New York Daily News in 1975.

More recently still, Internet culture has re-understood the acoustic potential of caps. In the social network, all caps certainly get attention but not necessarily the good kind. (My spam folder is occasionally visited by a bot with a thing for all caps, pitching me as BELOVED FRIEND or DEAR ONE.)

But nonbots (yes, you know who you are) also cap with a vengeance. Beneath its fortissimo typography, the email home from college that reads in full MOM STOP TEXTING ME has some of the charm of Western Union, but it’s meant to be forcefully brusque. (Don’t worry, Alex — Mom knows you still love her, in your way.)

Students may get away with all caps, but that’s the privilege of youth. For the rest of us, academe is a linguistic field where no possible slight goes unsuspected. The all-caps message is a case in point. Email, our ubiquitous but tonally opaque medium, is easily bruised. SORRY WE CANNOT UPGRADE YOUR PARKING SPACE is a message best delivered with upper- and lowercase letters. A few more explanatory words might help, too.

To uppercase is, of course, to set text or a portion of text entirely in capital letters or to raise the first letter of a word. To lowercase is to do the opposite. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t yet acknowledge the verb to uppercase, but to lowercase dates back to 1895.

More recently, the programming language Ruby, designed in the 1990s by Yukihiro Matsumoto, incorporates functions to which it assigns the verbs to upcase and to downcase. Programming language can, for example, describe a symbol as being upcased  instead of being set in uppercase.

Given the ubiquitous presence of digital-think, will we all soon be upcasing and downcasing?

For those of you with more advanced tastes in capitalization, may I suggest camelcase, a term I only recently discovered. Camelcase describes typographic arrangements like CinemaScope — two elements mashed together, each beginning with a capital letter.  In this instance, the camelcase  is of the bactrian, or two-humped, variety. Presumably dromedary camelcase would have only an internal cap — as in camelCase.

But these are niceties and refinements. The awful truth of all-caps messaging is that it’s lexical shouting, and that’s just rude.

When it comes to email, messages, and important terms in the report you’re writing, bigger may be louder, but louder isn’t always clearer.

Of course, if you absolutely insist on emailing in all caps, I’ve got the address of someone who would be happy to receive your messages, and who will, I promise, address you in return as BELOVED FRIEND.

Folllow me on Twitter @WmGermano