The i Before You Except After me
If i remember correctly, in Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury suggests that the beginning of the end was when people stopped building front porches on their houses. That led to a lack of communication with neighbors and more time spent by one’s self, leading to walls of televisions in order to stay entertained. I argue that it may have began long before then when short-sighted typographers, for clarity’s sake, started capitalizing the first-person pronoun.
I found this article in the New York Times remarkably interesting and almost ridiculously informative.
To put my money where my trying-to-be-less-self-important mouth is, i’m no longer going to capitalize myself (and that’s not a euphemism) except when beginning a sentence, or when the consequences could make me look more silly than i’m willing to look at that moment. Eventually, i might try to start capitalizing “You” or “You All” like those zany Germans.
Incidentally, i’ve argued for years now that the German civilization has produced more great minds than any other civilization. Could this majuscular practice be to blame? Most likely not, but i really doubt that it’s hurting.
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August 5th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I love the title of this post.
It’s true, Germans capitalize the formal form of you, “Sie”, and I have seen that some Germans are starting to capitalize the informal version, “Du”, formerly “du”. The first person pronoun “ich” is still not capitalized.
I mentioned this stuff in my German post, which you may or may not have bothered to translate into English via Babelfish.
I also said something about how some people think this means Germans show respect to other people while English-speakers show respect to themselves, but I argued that it’s merely language difference and doesn’t necessarily carry such a connotation. Germans also capitalize all nouns, whereas we only capitalize “proper” nouns. Does this mean we think some nouns are better than others and Germans think they are all equal? I think not.
Incidentally, I know a fine blogger who has done away with capitalization altogether. I suppose the fact that we have big and small letters is a little odd to begin with. I remember thinking about this long ago during my linguistics studies and I planned to do research on orthographic conventions, but never got around to it. So now I vow that I shall renew that goal, and then never get around to it again.
Sorry for the excessively long comment. :S
August 12th, 2008 at 1:07 am
The Italian word for “I,” which is “io,” is not capitalized.
Italy has also won far more World Cups than Germany. Discussion over. I accept your apology.