As we have witnessed, I have a knack for predicting future trends. This time I will extend myself beyond the world of triathlon and tell you why we will no longer capitalize many words in our written language in 50 years or fewer.
I noticed a pattern several years ago while using chat clients at work. I used to burn calories in the sitting position at an office that didn't monitor Internet usage, so I chatted with several other friends via Yahoo messenger quite a bit. If you haven't noticed, chat language is short and exhibits quite a bit of disdain for proper grammar. While email still resembles a proper letter, chat is so instantaneous and back-and-forth, many proprieties are simply given up. People who converse quite a bit via chat will even develop their own words, phrases, and symbols that may mean nothing to anybody else. I think the speed of chat is a breeding ground for incredibly fast evolutions of language on their own tangents. You might not know that "ping!" means "Hello!" to me, but my chat friends sure do.
Around this time arrives phones with full-blown email clients on board. I started out with a Sidekick and eventually graduated to an HTC Wizard. What's nice about some of the writing applications on these is that they capitalize the first word of every new sentence for you. People are now using these phone email clients quite a bit and the self-capitalizing feature is quite nice.
I switch jobs and start working at an office where outside chat clients are frowned upon, but we still have an internal chat package, so I'm still using it to get work done. I'm now also used to not having to capitalize because of my phone's software. Little by little, I accidentally keep letting capitalization slide. I start letting it slide in chat, forum posts, short emails to friends, on and on. This has been going on for years and no one has mentioned it to me. No one seems to care and it makes no change to the context of the conversation!
I'm sitting in a technical writing class a few weeks ago and the instructor is telling us all the things that used to be wrong that are now OK. Splitting infinitives, beginning a sentence with "and"; the list is numerous. It is quite amusing to see peoples' worlds completely wrecked to find out they've been spelling or using a word the wrong way their whole lives, by the way. More importantly, the teacher focuses on what's changed, but never on what might change. I raise my hand and suggest that capitalization could be gone in 50 years. I'm laughed off, but I manage to point out that the things that have changed now would be scoffed at 50 years ago.
i'd like to demonstrate my point in the rest of this posting. you see, no sentence begins without a space and punctuation before it or without the start of a new paragraph. the beginning of every sentence is obvious because of punctuation or spacing. much like that study that showed that you can jumble up words as long as you keep the first and last letters the same, the brain can easily determine that this is the end of a sentence. the combination of chat clients and self-capitalizing software has created the perfect storm for many of us to realize that capitalizing the first letter of a new sentence is actually, well, pointless.
the tech writing instructor showed us many examples of how you can do certain things in informal writing and not in formal, which i'm sure this will follow. you can write like this to a friend, but don't do it on a job applicaton. and what will happen with proper names, such as joe or bob? hard to tell right now. another interesting fact is that the blog software i'm using right now has several templates that have fonts with no capitalization, so it's not just me thinking this. it's almost like it's a signature of the writtings of the tech-savvy. it doesn't look as nice as proper capitalization, but it sure isn't necessary. with our ever-quickening society, whatever's not necessary will be tossed in half a century.
have you been writing without capitalization? does it bother you when other people do it? can you think of an example where it doesn't work? i can't.
Sunday, May 13, 2007 at 3:30PM 