Aha. Here’s a good reason why we should keep using capital letters:
Using capital letters to start sentences is similar to indenting, or doublespacing, to indicate paragraph divisions. The practice makes it easier for readers to move through a piece of prose.
As a reader, it is harder to keep one’s place, or to locate a key passage, if one is faced with a large block of words. If writers stop using caps, the next step may be the elimination of spaces between words.
As a former teacher of writing and rhetoric, I emphasized that writers should be sensitive to the needs of their audience. Keeping caps in standard English is one way of showing concern for readers.
The purpose of linguistic rules is to make communication easier. If we all agree on a set of such rules, we can more easily understand each other. That said, the rules do change over time, and the human mind is adaptable. Once a critical mass of people has adapted to new rules, those new rules become the norm.
Doncha just love slippery slope arguments? “If writers stop using caps, the next step may be the elimination of spaces between words.” isn’t really very different from the argument that allowing gay marriage will lead to people marrying their dogs.
A few thoughts.
I’m not sure I agree that the purpose of (prescriptive) linguistic rules is to make communication easier. Saying who instead of whom when the latter is “correct” usually has no effect on the ease of communication. It does any number of other things, including giving society a sign by which to recognize the elite, allowing different registers of diction, informing writing/speaking style, and so on.
By the way, ZeeGeezer, Ms. Kern may very well be correct in her prediction about the direction of written English. The manuscripts of Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Euripides, and Sophocles omit not only capital letters and spaces between words but also punctuation of any kind. And heaven forfend our students’ standards should sink as low as theirs.
it is so terrible when people don’t use capital letters. it bugs the heck out of me.
hehe. This is fun. I feel as if I’m in college again. Seriously, I will contact my old advisor. The woman’s a genius and is probably following this.
Sort of related, haven’t a monstrously large number of e-speech words (like lol and omg…which I realize are acronyms) entered the lexicon enough to have made it into dictionaries?
Except, Eric, lol and omg have not (yet) entered the spoken lexicon, just the written one. Or at least I haven’t heard anybody say them except in a tone of very heavy isn’t-this-funny-since-we-really-only-type-it irony. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any other such words. Though my mind is very quickly becoming like a block of Swiss cheese, so that’s not necessarily saying very much.