Rescue Journal

have you actually given any thought....

Carol  ·  May 16, 2008

to the real purpose of capital letters? i think it was one of the very first plots of the beyond ancient, ancients...to make life more difficult than it has to be. sigh, and it became a pattern for humanity.

oral language always comes first and then the written word follows when someone with too much time on their hands starts goofing around with a charcol stick and a rock wall. and then the competition starts with each person who seeks to make it better by progressing from pictures to symbols to letters until finally the grammer kings and queens decide to prove how smart they could be. and before you know it you need a university degree, to write correctly what you speak in infancy.
we don't capitalize when we are speaking, we just say what we want to say and we don't visualize in our heads when we are hearing capitalized words either, we know from experience that a name is a name.

so now i have a reason for not capitalizing on this blog...it is not just about sheer laziness, it is a protest against doing something that makes something simple like speaking much more difficult just because some ancient smart person thought we looked more intelligent and impressive if the human spoken language was quite complicated when actually written down.
anyway, that is what i was thinking about this morning as a temporary work avoidence excuse.

these important thoughts all came about because i woke up to a huge mess of 10 pounds of flour, a open and scattered package of dried pasta, some tuna cans and other various things mixed well with someone's poop and pee... a certain under cupboard thief and mess maker is a very bad dog...clyde!

Comments

Emma

Sounds like you almost got yourself a tuna casserole with all that mess on the floor this morning. Minus the pee and poop of course!

Carol

ok...so honestly it is about sheer laziness...i am a one finger typer, PLEASEEE don't make me capitalize, i will have to train another finger!

Donna

I'm with Sheila. Call it old-fashioned if you want, but it is still a "visual thing". Capitalization makes you notice the start and ending of a thought. Otherwise, to me, it's just like a run-on sentence.

lynne

and i never use capital letters not very good on the computer anyways and it is just one more hassle. i am hoping people are smart enough to understand what i have said without a capital letter. lynne

Carol

that is what a period or a comma are for, a pause in written speech....i think capital letters are just decoration.

sheila

We naturally pause when we come to an end of a thought (or sentence) when we speak. When you don't use capitals I have a tendency to not naturally stop and then I sometimes have a hard time understanding what you said since the two sentences merge into one (and the two seperate thoughts become one). I sometimes have to re read your sentences. I use the capital letter as a visual signal that one sentence is ending and the other is beginning. I like capital letters because they are easier to see than the those little dots called periods.