ALL CAPS Killed the Exclamation Point
That Fez article. Oy. It took four times longer than expected to write, but I’m happy with the result even though I feel once I pass the fourth page of writing that I’m violating some weblog brevity rule.
As I endlessly rewrote the article, I realized that I’ve fully embraced the ALL CAPS STANDARD as a means of conveying what is traditionally done with an exclamation point. A little search of my 200+ weblog entries shows that I vastly prefer ALL CAPS to the exclamation point.
Before I explain this grammatical fetish, let me first explain that All Caps gets a bad rap as a tool of boobs. I blame AOL users for this because it is generally known that they are the source of all Internet evil. In the early days of the AOL Internet invasion, AOL users were bumbling around Usenet, annoying the locals, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. One of their traits was the USE OF ALL CAPS IN MESSAGES DUE TO THE FACT THEY WERE TOO STUPID TO HIT THE CAPS LOCK.
In reality, AOL users aren’t stupid. They weren’t really using their keyboard much because AOL designers decided, as much as possible, their users should use the mouse because there were only two buttons on a mouse and, well, lots more buttons on the keyboard. Less buttons… less decisions… less errors… more satisfaction. When Usenet access showed up in AOL, I think of lots of users were regularly typing in complete sentences for the first time and so, of course, they forget about that darned CAPS LOCK key because they weren’t looking at what they were typing… they were staring at their keyboards.
Let’s not let the sins of the past taint the grammatical beauty that is All Caps.
Yes, All Caps is yelling, but it infinitely more.
First, All Caps is much more efficient than the exclamation point. Similar to foreign languages such as Spanish, All Caps alerts you to the mood change from the very first letter. You decide:
- I like bread!
- I LIKE BREAD
- ¡Tengo gusto del pan!
In the first statement, you’ve got to wait until the very last character to understand this guy has a bread thing going. All Caps tells you right away that BREAD RULES.
All Caps is much more flexible than your common exclamation point. You can sprinkle it anywhere and see stay grammatical coherent. An example from the Fez article:
… When is the last time they generated a great idea that blew your mind? Are they talking in meetings or listening? Are they EVER talking? Are they ALWAYS talking?
See what I’m doing in this last two statements? All Caps allows me to ask a question AND throw emphasis on key words. You simply can not do that with boring old punctuation and grammar. WAIT WHAT ABOUT BOLD AND UNDERLINES? Please, I’m writing, not doing word processing.
Lastly, most importantly, and most personally… All Caps sounds different in my head than an exclamation point. This probably comes from years of Jerkcity, but an exclamation point makes a statement that come from this guy:
“That’s swell!”
Whereas an All Caps statement reads modern to me… it reads as means of conveying frustration mixed in with sarcasm, a bit of anger, and dash attitude. Anyone can exclaim, not everyone can All Cap.
