dear grammar nazis,

having until recently been an esteemed member of your respectable and overswollen ranks, i understand the code of honor and dignity that comes with a masterful grasp of the traditional use of this beautiful language we all speak in. at the same time, though, i understand that to purposelessly hold onto arbitrary conventions that would do everyone more good dead is not really a service to anyone. a speaker should be able to use their creativity and god given talent for language to use words in whatever way they find most effective.

ah, to hell with it. every sentence above subtly breaks one prescriptive rule, which was actually pretty hard to do.

so here's the long and short of it: language changes. but who gets to change it? who gets to say what's right and what's wrong? there are basically two camps on this: prescriptive and descriptive. prescriptivists give this authority to people who write manuals, basically. they claim the most educated are the most qualified to make the rules. these are the people who told us to never split infinitives (did you catch that? it was ironic. did you see? right?) or end a sentence in a preposition. then there are descriptivists who say the only measure of what's correct is what's effective. if a native speaker doesn't bat an eye at it, it's correct. so how does language change? individuals mess with it however they see fit. it's not so different from democracy, as opposed to a prescriptive oligarchy.

you can read about this on the internet, if you want to know more.

here's why we're getting into this now: capitalization. you'll notice i'm not using it.

i've thought about it, and there is simply no upside to capitalization except to distinguish proper nouns. when taking notes by hand, i also use all-caps headings because they're easier to pick out when looking back through. and it's a convention. it's like wearing black socks with black shoes, although i do recommend doing that, so i guess it's not like that at all. anyway, if you want to sound formal and respected, you should use capitals, just like you should dress up to get people to respect you. it's a convention. it's symbolic communication.

this blog, though. this is personal, not formal, and personally, i don't like capitals very much. i've decided to stop using them. except maybe i still will-- i don't know. this, though, is my explanation for foregoing capital letters.

enjoy!
claire


(i know, i said proper nouns. but you knew that was proper. and i didn't want to capitalize it, and that's my executive choice as a writer.)