Latest / Ridiculous History / When did ALL-CAPS type become YELLING?

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When did ALL-CAPS type become YELLING? · Ridiculous History

0:23
Speaker 1: Hello, or should I say hello? Or should I say hello?
0:27
Speaker 1: You could hear the regular letters, the capital letters, and
0:31
Speaker 1: possibly the italics. My name is Ben, my name is
0:34
Speaker 1: Nolan Ben. Why are you shouting at me? Oh? I'm
0:36
Speaker 1: shouting at our fellow friends and neighbors and listeners. And
0:41
Speaker 1: we prepped our super producer Casey Pegrum because we wanted
0:47
Speaker 1: him to know that someone was going to raise their voice.
0:51
Speaker 1: I do have to say, Ben, that was the most
0:52
Speaker 1: low grade shout that I've ever heard. That was a
0:54
Speaker 1: very gentle morning shout, and I appreciate that because it is,
0:57
Speaker 1: after all, nine am as we record this episode. Yeah,
1:00
Speaker 1: hopefully we could get the point across though. Null. Have
1:04
Speaker 1: you ever been in a moment, my old friend, where
1:07
Speaker 1: you feel like you could picture what someone is saying
1:11
Speaker 1: to you as though it were written down in text,
1:14
Speaker 1: sort of in like a comic bookie automotopeia kind of way. Yeah, sure, yeah,
1:19
Speaker 1: Like somebody, somebody says something with a certain amount of
1:22
Speaker 1: emphasis or shade, and you can picture the italics when
1:26
Speaker 1: they say, oh that one. See. It's interesting that you
1:29
Speaker 1: flip it in that direction, because when you when you
1:32
Speaker 1: look at it like that, Yes, I can get that tone,
1:34
Speaker 1: and I can picture a text version of it, but
1:37
Speaker 1: when you flip the script and look at the text
1:39
Speaker 1: only version, it is sometimes a little tricky to get
1:43
Speaker 1: that nuanced tone, which is why the fact that today
1:48
Speaker 1: people communicate more in the written language than ever before
1:53
Speaker 1: is an interesting conundrum because a lot is lost in translation,
1:57
Speaker 1: A lot of that tone and nuance flies right out
1:59
Speaker 1: the window, and we get a lot of cranky people
2:01
Speaker 1: that think that you're mad at them when you send
2:03
Speaker 1: them a text without any kind of signifiers of of levity,
2:07
Speaker 1: right right, And there's such a question that occurs because
2:11
Speaker 1: our punctuation system is still evolving to properly convey tone.
2:16
Speaker 1: You've heard of different attempts to, let's say, revise or
2:20
Speaker 1: clarify punctuation, like the famous and terra bang, which is
2:24
Speaker 1: a question mark that is also an exclamation mark. I
2:26
Speaker 1: love that word. It's uh. It's a word that can
2:30
Speaker 1: meet a lot of things, uh, and for our purposes,
2:33
Speaker 1: it describes this uh new attempt at punctuation. And this
2:38
Speaker 1: all exists because it's so very easy to misread text.
2:44
Speaker 1: You'll also hear the statistic that is, sometimes you'll hear
2:49
Speaker 1: sometimes you'll hear seventy or anywhere in that ballpark, just
2:53
Speaker 1: as the majority of information conveyed when you're talking to
2:57
Speaker 1: another person in person is actually not verbal. And that's
3:01
Speaker 1: the reason why if you look at a transcript of
3:04
Speaker 1: any conversation you have with any of your friends or
3:07
Speaker 1: strangers on the street, you'll find that the conversation itself
3:12
Speaker 1: doesn't make much sense. There are a lot of ellipses,
3:14
Speaker 1: there are a few coherent sentences. So when we are
3:19
Speaker 1: limited to a single form of communication, a text only interface,
3:26
Speaker 1: we have to think very carefully about what we say
3:30
Speaker 1: and how we type it. Yeah, I was talking about
3:33
Speaker 1: like little signifiers of levity. Like some people, uh depend
3:37
Speaker 1: on the exclamation mark. Some people absolutely despise the exclamation mark.
3:41
Speaker 1: I am one that uses it to show that I'm
3:43
Speaker 1: excited about something. And there are some people that I
3:45
Speaker 1: think get it and some people that it bugs the
3:47
Speaker 1: hell out of, like my girlfriend. So I do not
3:50
Speaker 1: text your exclamation marks anymore. But you know, you there's
3:52
Speaker 1: there's emojis obviously you can use to show that you're
3:55
Speaker 1: telling a joke or that you're, you know, being light
3:58
Speaker 1: about something. But the all powerful shouty caps is what
4:03
Speaker 1: today's episode is about, and it turns out that it's
4:06
Speaker 1: got a history that goes way farther back than just
4:09
Speaker 1: early Internet message boards and newsgroups. Right then, Yeah, absolutely no,
4:14
Speaker 1: because we're all familiar with an Internet forum where you
4:19
Speaker 1: see one person writing in all caps to emphasize something,
4:25
Speaker 1: sometimes without an exclamation mark, just very very loud. And
4:29
Speaker 1: we have all seen these comments online before. Now. I
4:33
Speaker 1: don't want to say these people because for Pete's sake
4:38
Speaker 1: or for Polk's sake, we have all been these people
4:41
Speaker 1: at some point when we are attempting to somehow encapsulate
4:46
Speaker 1: the entirety of in person communication in a single form
4:53
Speaker 1: of that communication. Man, you do not strike me as
4:56
Speaker 1: a text shouter. You're far too eloquent for that. Say
5:00
Speaker 1: it ain't. So that's very kind, but I feel that
5:03
Speaker 1: it works really well with some comedic things. Uh, there
5:08
Speaker 1: was only one time in my life I ever did
5:10
Speaker 1: it seriously, and I stand by. You gotta pick your battles.
5:16
Speaker 1: So what happened when we look at the state of communication?
5:21
Speaker 1: What strange is that in any Latin based language, So
5:27
Speaker 1: anything that doesn't use idiograms, like like an Eastern language, right,
5:31
Speaker 1: in any Latin based language is known as shouting if
5:36
Speaker 1: you use capital letters. We mentioned that this goes further
5:41
Speaker 1: back than you might imagine, but how far back does
5:44
Speaker 1: it go? Yeah, it's really interesting because you would think
5:46
Speaker 1: that this is sort of a product of the Internet,
5:50
Speaker 1: like we're talking about with those early message boards stuff.
5:52
Speaker 1: But as it turns out, according to a really cool
5:55
Speaker 1: piece written on math dot com, which I think started
5:58
Speaker 1: out as like e commerce site and then ended up
6:01
Speaker 1: being more of a message board, a guy by the
6:03
Speaker 1: name of Dave Fleischman kind of delves into the evolution
6:07
Speaker 1: of using all caps as this indicator of shouting, and
6:11
Speaker 1: he actually found quite a few examples that date back
6:15
Speaker 1: hundreds of years. As it turns out, No, I propose
6:19
Speaker 1: that as we travel to meet Mr Fleischman, we go
6:25
Speaker 1: the long route and stop by the Roman Empire first,
6:29
Speaker 1: courtesy of our super producers time machine. He is really
6:36
Speaker 1: a jack of all trade that Casey Pegraman produces at
6:39
Speaker 1: its engineers has a segment on the case with Casey
6:43
Speaker 1: and as it turns out, is a scientific genius and
6:45
Speaker 1: inventor of time machines. We are some lucky dudes to
6:48
Speaker 1: be associated with this giant. Do you notice that he
6:53
Speaker 1: doesn't go with us on these jaunts through time and space. No, no,
6:56
Speaker 1: he has to be in the home base, keeping an
6:59
Speaker 1: eye on things and make and he pulls us out
7:01
Speaker 1: like Star Trek style when things get hairy. I gotta
7:04
Speaker 1: have a man at the switch. Right here we are
7:07
Speaker 1: Roman Empire. Observe all the amazing architecture, all the strange dress,
7:13
Speaker 1: all the written text. I'm doing it. I'm observing it.
7:18
Speaker 1: And as we're looking at this architecture, let's observe all
7:22
Speaker 1: these numerous written inscriptions. Those are capital letters. Capital letters
7:28
Speaker 1: evolved in this time during the Roman Empire because the
7:32
Speaker 1: stone cutters who made these monuments and made these buildings
7:37
Speaker 1: also made inscriptions using large, straight letters. They both were
7:43
Speaker 1: easily legible, and they showed grandiose nature. Right, they added
7:49
Speaker 1: some gravitas, that's right. Ben. In fact, in an article
7:53
Speaker 1: from The New Republic by Alice Rob, rob interviews Professor
7:57
Speaker 1: Paul Luna, who's the director of the Department Typography and
8:01
Speaker 1: Graphic Communication at the University of Reading in the UK,
8:04
Speaker 1: and Luna cites that the use of all caps was
8:09
Speaker 1: meant to convey grandeur, pomposity, aesthetic seriousness, and has been
8:15
Speaker 1: used that way for thousands of years, as we're seeing
8:17
Speaker 1: with our very eyes during this time travel tableau. Yes,
8:21
Speaker 1: and there's not a chicken and egg situation here, which
8:26
Speaker 1: I find so fascinating. It is proven that what we
8:31
Speaker 1: interpret his upper case today did come before lower case.
8:36
Speaker 1: Lower case became an adaptation of upper case, the same
8:40
Speaker 1: way that Taken started out as a film and is
8:44
Speaker 1: now a television adaptation. That's a really good way of
8:48
Speaker 1: looking at it. It's true, um lower case letters were
8:51
Speaker 1: developed more um as as a functional kind of thing
8:55
Speaker 1: so that the books could be written by hand. In fact,
8:59
Speaker 1: it was during shar Arle Maine's Carolinian Renaissance, which happened
9:02
Speaker 1: from the late eighth century to the ninth century UM,
9:06
Speaker 1: where a group of monks under the leadership of Alcon
9:10
Speaker 1: of York, who is an English scholar, um created this
9:14
Speaker 1: Carolinian minuscule script that would serve as the basis for
9:18
Speaker 1: what would become the modern upper case lower case alphabet
9:21
Speaker 1: we know today, right that sweet Sweet mixtape, that crossover
9:25
Speaker 1: that then diagram where you can write every letter at
9:29
Speaker 1: least two ways. Fast forward to Italy. By the time
9:33
Speaker 1: movable type reaches Italy, this writing had evolved to that
9:37
Speaker 1: consistent model. And if we check back with our friend
9:42
Speaker 1: Mr Fleishman, whom I would like to call Dave at
9:45
Speaker 1: this point, are you okay with that? Okay with Dave? Right?
9:48
Speaker 1: So it's one of the Dames. We know. He's one
9:49
Speaker 1: of the Daves. We know. There are several days we know,
9:52
Speaker 1: but he is one. Dave tells us that the first
9:56
Speaker 1: citation he can find in the modern age for the
10:00
Speaker 1: use of all caps for some sort of emphasis occurs
10:04
Speaker 1: in a Washington, d c. Newspaper called The Evening Star,
10:08
Speaker 1: in an article that published on February eighteen fifty six,
10:15
Speaker 1: and it's a there's a use of air quotes here.
10:20
Speaker 1: Dave calls it a quote hilarious dialect story about a
10:24
Speaker 1: Dutchman who appears to be disease written, and we have
10:28
Speaker 1: the sentence here for you. Idells you I've got the smallpox,
10:32
Speaker 1: don't you vettesh death smallpox? This time he shouted it
10:36
Speaker 1: in capital letters, and the capital letters there that's my pox,
10:40
Speaker 1: are are small pox? And I think that was a
10:44
Speaker 1: great reading. Noll. We we want to say we are
10:48
Speaker 1: not doing We're not doing any sort of Dutch stereotype
10:52
Speaker 1: or Dutch. Isn't a bad Dutch Dutch voice sign into
10:55
Speaker 1: a Dutchman. Yeah, I don't think it was a bad
10:57
Speaker 1: Dutch voice. But I want people to know that you
11:00
Speaker 1: were reading it as it was written. Yes, indeed, yes, indeed,
11:06
Speaker 1: as it turns out, I think, Um, he was talking
11:08
Speaker 1: about a small box and not small box. That's what
11:12
Speaker 1: it says in the article by Bye Fleishman. Um. We've
11:15
Speaker 1: got a bunch of cool examples of this from Mr Fleishman.
11:18
Speaker 1: Another one is from eighteen seventy um from the Shamrock
11:23
Speaker 1: in Ireland, which published a multi part fictional series called
11:28
Speaker 1: The Sore Grievance of Well Spanked John. He was well spanked,
11:33
Speaker 1: um and at one point the narrator, for whatever reason
11:36
Speaker 1: I'd like to get my hands on, this is thrown
11:38
Speaker 1: into a basket of duck eggs. Must have been a
11:41
Speaker 1: big basket, yes, and uh we have the line here.
11:45
Speaker 1: Uh is shortly after his auentes told she must pay
11:48
Speaker 1: for this great basket of duck eggs twelve shillings and
11:52
Speaker 1: seven pence roared by ants and the biggest capital letters
11:56
Speaker 1: twelve and seven pence. Good gracious me, that is a
12:00
Speaker 1: hefty ticket price for a basket duck ages. But if
12:03
Speaker 1: it was big enough for a grown man to fall into,
12:05
Speaker 1: that actually seems like a pretty good deal, yes, or
12:10
Speaker 1: uh for anyone you know, don't. Isn't that part of
12:14
Speaker 1: the American dream? A basket of duck eggs big enough
12:17
Speaker 1: to fall in? Yeah? I like it, you know, sort
12:19
Speaker 1: of like a metaphor for the good life, like a
12:21
Speaker 1: bowl of cherries, a basket of duck eggs. There we go,
12:24
Speaker 1: and in the it's interesting because in both of these
12:27
Speaker 1: cases there are capital letters, but they apply to two
12:33
Speaker 1: different things. They have two different connotations, which I would
12:37
Speaker 1: argue are readily apparent. In the Evening Star example, as
12:42
Speaker 1: as Noel explained, their smallpox is humorous with its capitalization, right,
12:50
Speaker 1: and we are laughing at the character's voice because it
12:55
Speaker 1: meant small box, but they said small pox. And in
13:00
Speaker 1: a second example, the capitalization is on twelve and seven
13:05
Speaker 1: because the aunt is so aghast at this rapacious fee
13:11
Speaker 1: for the past dug um. Next, we have one that's
13:14
Speaker 1: really interesting because it comes from a manual for the
13:18
Speaker 1: proper use of the language. Right. So this is from
13:20
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty and the book was called the Standard Speaker
13:23
Speaker 1: and elocutionist, and it says to readers um. It gives
13:27
Speaker 1: some examples that the following selections are marked in capital letters,
13:31
Speaker 1: which is in capital letters in this quote UM as
13:34
Speaker 1: the appropriate place for shouting emphasis. And it uses UH
13:39
Speaker 1: an example of a fantastic poem by Tennyson called the
13:42
Speaker 1: Charge of the Light Brigade. There are other examples such
13:47
Speaker 1: as the enthusiasm of the shouting capital letters or warning
13:51
Speaker 1: signals which flash up in front of his eyes and
13:55
Speaker 1: shouting capital letters slow down. That's and all of these
14:00
Speaker 1: amples are from that piece Capital Crimes, Part one Shout Shout,
14:03
Speaker 1: Let it All Out, by our pal Dave Fleishman UM
14:07
Speaker 1: and you can check this out yourself on Matt dot com.
14:11
Speaker 1: Definitely worth a read, and it's two parts to boot.
14:14
Speaker 1: And so we see these uses of language evolving in
14:19
Speaker 1: different places, almost in different periods of time. And the
14:23
Speaker 1: funny thing is that every single time they pop up
14:27
Speaker 1: post Roman era, people know what it means. They know
14:30
Speaker 1: if it's a joke when they're reading it, they know
14:32
Speaker 1: if it's a very strong imperative sentence, you know, or
14:37
Speaker 1: any number of traffic signs that I have been in
14:41
Speaker 1: trouble for violating and we will get back to traffic
14:43
Speaker 1: signs a little bit later. But you're absolutely correct. So
14:46
Speaker 1: I think all of this talk we've been doing, we've
14:48
Speaker 1: we've been doing in the Roman era, so we should, uh,
14:51
Speaker 1: we should we should rewind back to the present. Yeah,
14:53
Speaker 1: people are looking at us. Could call good call hey, Casey.
15:01
Speaker 1: Thanks for pulling us back there. He we we got
15:04
Speaker 1: a just doing my job, not I know, but it
15:06
Speaker 1: was getting harry and we didn't he knew, he already knew.
15:09
Speaker 1: He had a cute up and ready to go. He
15:11
Speaker 1: didn't even need us to use the safe word, which
15:14
Speaker 1: is fidelio. That's your safe word. I have a different one.
15:18
Speaker 1: He has a little confusing what's that? Because a little confusing?
15:20
Speaker 1: We should should should we just sync up on safe words.
15:23
Speaker 1: I'm glad to use yours? Oh hey, you don't want
15:26
Speaker 1: to share it wouldn't be safe. We're in a president
15:35
Speaker 1: where the president of the United States tweets using all caps,
15:38
Speaker 1: which is interesting, yes, interesting, and sets a precedent. We
15:44
Speaker 1: are watching linguistic history evolve as we record today. Right uh.
15:51
Speaker 1: For Fleishman, there's a difference between shouting and signifying importance,
15:57
Speaker 1: right uh, And Fleishman does are you He's on the
16:00
Speaker 1: same page with us that everyone alive today who uses
16:03
Speaker 1: no online service understands that when you use upper case
16:07
Speaker 1: you're shouting. It is kind of intuitive and it makes
16:10
Speaker 1: sense visually actually, because Professor Paul luna Um in that
16:16
Speaker 1: New Republic piece is how he characterizes it. Quote all
16:19
Speaker 1: capitals provides visibility, maximum size within a given area. All
16:24
Speaker 1: caps in an email looks like shouting, because when someone
16:26
Speaker 1: is shouting, you're aware of the shout and not the nuance.
16:30
Speaker 1: All caps fills the space, so there's an element of
16:33
Speaker 1: feeling that the message is crowding out everything else. And
16:37
Speaker 1: this kind of comes back to the idea that in general,
16:41
Speaker 1: shouty caps is looked at his kind of poor form
16:45
Speaker 1: and and kind of rude and almost a replacement for
16:49
Speaker 1: substance at times. Yeah, agreed, and a little bit outdated
16:54
Speaker 1: because it's associated with perhaps a lack of familiarity with
17:01
Speaker 1: online communication in this day and age. And found a
17:04
Speaker 1: very interesting thing here. The original typewriters were all capital
17:11
Speaker 1: we're all upper case letters, meaning that if you had
17:14
Speaker 1: an older, outdated keyboarder typewriter, something pre eight ten, nine four,
17:20
Speaker 1: So then the only letters you could send would look
17:23
Speaker 1: like very loud telegrams. And it's funny because my mom
17:26
Speaker 1: texts this way to this day. I'm not joking. She
17:29
Speaker 1: texts not all caps, but there's no punctuation. But that
17:32
Speaker 1: has become kind of a trope, right that if you
17:35
Speaker 1: are seen as using all caps, you're either being rude
17:38
Speaker 1: and loud and shouty, or like you said, you're using
17:42
Speaker 1: outdated technology and therefore seen as being old school, or
17:46
Speaker 1: really just plain Hold and let's get back to our
17:49
Speaker 1: our tweeting president. A guy named Stephen Huxley who's the
17:52
Speaker 1: Chair of Communication and Media at Swinburne University of Technology
17:56
Speaker 1: in Australia. He says in an article from The Washington
18:01
Speaker 1: Post uh that it's pretty unusual. Highly unusual is how
18:05
Speaker 1: he phrases it, for a president to rely on all
18:07
Speaker 1: caps um in these public messages. And that is because
18:13
Speaker 1: quote him, because it's perfect quote. If your message is good,
18:17
Speaker 1: your message is clear, you don't need to add emphasis.
18:20
Speaker 1: It's irrelevant. Um. He says that using all caps signals
18:24
Speaker 1: that there has been a communication breakdown between the sender
18:28
Speaker 1: and the receiver, So it implies that you're kind of
18:31
Speaker 1: struggling to communicate in a way, and he uses the
18:34
Speaker 1: example of someone who is trying to communicate with someone
18:36
Speaker 1: who speaks of foreign language and repeats themselves, not only
18:41
Speaker 1: repeats themselves, but actually as though like the loudness of
18:47
Speaker 1: it will make it easier to understand, which we all
18:49
Speaker 1: know is absolutely not the case, and comes off as
18:52
Speaker 1: like WHOA, get out of my face with that, you know,
18:55
Speaker 1: And he says that it's poor form and it's rude,
18:59
Speaker 1: and it's received eaved as route as it should be
19:02
Speaker 1: kind of. And so if we if we ask where
19:07
Speaker 1: this spring from in the modern age online, right, we
19:12
Speaker 1: know that we know that beforehand it was relatively intuitive. Right,
19:18
Speaker 1: pay attention to this is what that means, especially if
19:21
Speaker 1: you're looking at a sentence where upper and lower case
19:25
Speaker 1: phrases are mixed together. If you look at all of them,
19:28
Speaker 1: you're going, oh, no, another forward email from one of
19:32
Speaker 1: my relatives or something. In the online sphere. Early Internet
19:36
Speaker 1: users would say this interpretation of all caps is shouting
19:42
Speaker 1: like the current president would go back to at least
19:47
Speaker 1: in March, there was a fellow named Dave Daco d
19:51
Speaker 1: E c O T who was at the time a
19:53
Speaker 1: computer science student at Case Western Reserve University. In a forum,
19:58
Speaker 1: he aid out what he saw as three different types
20:04
Speaker 1: of UM communication through visual design, right rather than content.
20:10
Speaker 1: He said that there were three sorts of emphasis in use,
20:15
Speaker 1: and he ordered them in popularity. So we're gonna start
20:18
Speaker 1: at number three and go up to the most popular.
20:21
Speaker 1: Number three, he said, was space c words out uh,
20:26
Speaker 1: you know, putting a space between the S, the P,
20:29
Speaker 1: the A, the CD, I, n G in spacing. And
20:32
Speaker 1: it's interesting because the spacing out words thing is kind
20:35
Speaker 1: of stuck around, but more in an aesthetic way, with
20:38
Speaker 1: like meme pages and message boards and tumblr like as
20:42
Speaker 1: a way of kind of creating sort of a fun
20:44
Speaker 1: aesthetic look like. For example, there's a band that I
20:47
Speaker 1: really like, an electronic band called Survive, and the way
20:50
Speaker 1: their name is always printed is in all caps with
20:53
Speaker 1: a space between every letter. So this actually combines it,
20:56
Speaker 1: which is what he said it would do, spacing words
20:58
Speaker 1: out possibly accompanied by one and two on this list
21:01
Speaker 1: to being using asterisks to put sparklers around an emphasized word.
21:06
Speaker 1: I've never heard that before, so try to hear. This
21:09
Speaker 1: is going to be a fun experiment for everybody. Try
21:12
Speaker 1: to read that sentence again and then put asterix if
21:16
Speaker 1: you can verbally around one of those words, and let's
21:18
Speaker 1: see if people can guess which one it is. Using
21:21
Speaker 1: asterisks to put sparklers around emphasized words. I feel like
21:26
Speaker 1: that was pretty apparent, don't you. I wish I had
21:28
Speaker 1: a way like verbally to make my words sparkle. I
21:31
Speaker 1: think you do pretty well. I think we both do.
21:34
Speaker 1: And number one, of course, is using capital letters to
21:38
Speaker 1: make the word look louder. It's true. So this again
21:43
Speaker 1: dates back to hardware issue, a technological adaptation issue. We
21:51
Speaker 1: talked about early typewriters. I mentioned the evolution from upper
21:56
Speaker 1: lower case for typewriters, but there was something similar that
21:59
Speaker 1: occurred with computer terminals. Yeah that's right. Um, this message
22:04
Speaker 1: board post was just after computer terminals switched from all
22:07
Speaker 1: upper case, like you're talking about those old typewriters to
22:09
Speaker 1: mixed case keyboards. Um, so when you've got the option
22:13
Speaker 1: of your writing in lower case or uper case letters,
22:15
Speaker 1: or a mix of the two. The early web thought
22:18
Speaker 1: that all caps was a great way to communicate emphasis
22:22
Speaker 1: or shouting. But if you didn't know what the the
22:26
Speaker 1: necticut I guess was, um, then using all caps just
22:30
Speaker 1: made you seem old, Like I was saying earlier, this
22:33
Speaker 1: idea that you were not up to date on the
22:36
Speaker 1: newer technology um or the new uh internet lingo? Right yeah,
22:41
Speaker 1: As as I pointed out with the typewriter's stuff, the
22:45
Speaker 1: implication is that perhaps somebody is still bound by pre
22:49
Speaker 1: existing or un updated technology, or as Nuel mentioned, perhaps
22:55
Speaker 1: they are not catching up on netiquet. So Fleishman was
23:01
Speaker 1: pretty clear that the Internet did not invent this. So
23:05
Speaker 1: every time you get that crazy email or that strange
23:10
Speaker 1: text store, that that weird post in a forum where
23:14
Speaker 1: somebody's saying something relatively normal such as, I don't know, um,
23:19
Speaker 1: peanut butter sandwiches are actually pretty good with bananas and
23:22
Speaker 1: honey added, and it's all in caps. They might not
23:26
Speaker 1: know that they're yelling at you. It's it's a real
23:29
Speaker 1: thing and it existed before the Internet. They're smallpox. Sorry,
23:37
Speaker 1: it's actually it's actually a pretty good joke, and I
23:39
Speaker 1: like the way Noel read it. And where does this
23:44
Speaker 1: leave us today? Well? Um, In this article how all
23:49
Speaker 1: caps came to signify shouting as in Trump's see you
23:52
Speaker 1: in Court? By Ben Greno from The Washington Post, Guarino
23:57
Speaker 1: makes a really interesting point about the evolution of language.
24:02
Speaker 1: He cites a quote from Richard Sterling, who teaches at
24:05
Speaker 1: the University of California, Berkeley. He spoke the New York Times,
24:09
Speaker 1: and I was talking about this idea that younger Internet
24:12
Speaker 1: users who have been brought up with a much more
24:14
Speaker 1: casual attitude towards capitalization and punctuation, how casual emails often
24:20
Speaker 1: are completely written in lower case. And he says, I
24:24
Speaker 1: think in the future capitalization will disappear. And he says
24:29
Speaker 1: he doesn't think it's that worrying at all, because language,
24:32
Speaker 1: as we've talked about in other episodes of the show,
24:34
Speaker 1: can evolve and and should be adaptable. But it's interesting
24:39
Speaker 1: because there is actually has been sort of a backlash
24:43
Speaker 1: against the caps lock key the key itself. Do you
24:47
Speaker 1: know about this, Ben, This is really interesting. Yeah, absolutely,
24:50
Speaker 1: tell us about it well. Um. In the New Republic
24:53
Speaker 1: article how capitalitters became Internet code for yelling, the author
24:58
Speaker 1: Alice rob spoke to a man by the name of
25:01
Speaker 1: Matthew J. X Malady, who made it his life's work,
25:06
Speaker 1: or at least part of it, to get rid of
25:09
Speaker 1: the caps lock key entirely. And he told Slate quote
25:13
Speaker 1: the key is a nuisance. It's prime real estate, leading
25:17
Speaker 1: us to depress it unintentionally and often unwinningly. And the
25:22
Speaker 1: article also talks about a man named Peter Hinens who
25:27
Speaker 1: launched a campaign called caps off in two thousand six
25:31
Speaker 1: uh to get the key removed from the keyboard entirely.
25:35
Speaker 1: It was not a successful effort yet yet it is
25:38
Speaker 1: still around. But yeah, you know you use the shift key.
25:42
Speaker 1: Why do you even need caps lock? You just to
25:44
Speaker 1: hold down the shift key. Hilarious part about the caps
25:47
Speaker 1: off campaign, by the way, is that their slogan is
25:50
Speaker 1: stop shouting in all caps uh in in good riddance uh.
25:56
Speaker 1: The article by Christopher Beam on Slate UH. They also
26:00
Speaker 1: note that Google, when they unveiled their Google CR forty
26:05
Speaker 1: eight notebook, made the decision to ditch the cap slot key.
26:09
Speaker 1: No way, Yeah, they took it out. Oh man, you're
26:12
Speaker 1: going to have to hold down shift ladies and gentlemen.
26:15
Speaker 1: And if you think about it, if you're looking at
26:17
Speaker 1: if you're in the Western world, you're probably working with
26:20
Speaker 1: a Querity computer named after the six letters at the
26:24
Speaker 1: top left right. Then you can see if you look
26:27
Speaker 1: at your keyboard now, if you have one that caps
26:29
Speaker 1: like can shift are are kind of redundant. You know.
26:32
Speaker 1: You even noticed those little brail kind of hash marks
26:34
Speaker 1: on the F and the J keys on the keyboard.
26:36
Speaker 1: Apparently those are meant to help you find the home
26:40
Speaker 1: row touch type. You can touch type, and now I
26:42
Speaker 1: don't do that. I didn't want to type like that.
26:43
Speaker 1: I just kind of learned, you know, thrown into the
26:45
Speaker 1: fire and just kind of figured it all out. I'm
26:47
Speaker 1: a child of the Internet. Um, this is neat though,
26:50
Speaker 1: this this movement away from all caps, and this like
26:53
Speaker 1: seeing it as being kind of ghost and like poor
26:56
Speaker 1: communication skills. It extends to government agency that It turns
27:00
Speaker 1: out the National Weather Service had a history of using
27:03
Speaker 1: all caps and its weather reports, and that was because
27:06
Speaker 1: the teletype machine that had been historically used only communicated
27:10
Speaker 1: in capital letters. But on April eleven, the National Weather
27:15
Speaker 1: Service UH sent a press release in all caps that
27:18
Speaker 1: said this listen up. Beginning on May eleven, Noah's National
27:24
Speaker 1: Weather Service forecasts will stop yelling at you. That's great.
27:34
Speaker 1: This is where we're at now. It appears that the
27:38
Speaker 1: ragn of all caps maybe coming to a close as
27:43
Speaker 1: Nedicut evolves. But I argue there's something greater at work here,
27:47
Speaker 1: and I want to see what you think about this,
27:50
Speaker 1: because we we see these backlashes against the language changing English,
27:57
Speaker 1: the language we were speaking in case anybody was listening
28:00
Speaker 1: and wondering, what is this strange sound? I understand English
28:04
Speaker 1: is a living language, which means that it evolves by consensus,
28:09
Speaker 1: no matter um how the people at the O E.
28:12
Speaker 1: D Or Oxford English Dictionary labor. Ultimately, the people who
28:17
Speaker 1: speak the language decide what the language means and how
28:21
Speaker 1: it is best represented audibly or in type, in some
28:25
Speaker 1: sort of physical form. And now what we're seeing, despite
28:27
Speaker 1: the objection of the numerous so called grammar nazis, is
28:31
Speaker 1: a move away from punctuation, and we're moving toward or
28:36
Speaker 1: should I say back toward an idio grammatic sort of language.
28:41
Speaker 1: With the rise of one of your favorite things, pal emoji,
28:46
Speaker 1: I'm a fan. You know. Our coworker Tristan, another superproducer
28:52
Speaker 1: in the house Stuff Works family Um is a big
28:55
Speaker 1: fan of of communicating exclusively using emojis solely, and he
28:59
Speaker 1: only chose like three yeah, exactly, but somehow it gets
29:03
Speaker 1: the idea across. The O face emoji is the big one.
29:06
Speaker 1: He likes to use. And what we're noting here about
29:09
Speaker 1: the idea graphic use of emoji is that currently it
29:14
Speaker 1: seems really controversial. As we're recording this, just a few
29:18
Speaker 1: years back, pretty recent in the historical record, someone wrote
29:22
Speaker 1: a novel entirely in emoji, which I have not read,
29:26
Speaker 1: so I cannot comment on it. But there are a
29:29
Speaker 1: lot of faces in it. Oh, there's an eggplant. That
29:31
Speaker 1: might be the racy part here. There's a movie that's
29:34
Speaker 1: written all in emoji like a script. It's the Emoji Movie. Okay,
29:39
Speaker 1: it's really sad. Casey Pegram will cringe at this. But
29:43
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia recently lifted its ban on public movie screenings
29:48
Speaker 1: and the first movie that was available for public screening
29:51
Speaker 1: was the Emoji Movie. So emoji are popular, and what
29:56
Speaker 1: strange is that they're approaching a universality and ubiquity. Uh,
30:03
Speaker 1: they're approaching something like a common tongue. You and I
30:08
Speaker 1: don't have to speak Arabic in order to understand a
30:12
Speaker 1: smiling face. It's true. But these, uh, these sets of
30:15
Speaker 1: emoji graphics that come stock on a lot of phones
30:19
Speaker 1: have their roots in in Japan, and so there are
30:22
Speaker 1: a lot of of of emojis that have different meanings
30:26
Speaker 1: you know, to the Japanese and they do to us.
30:29
Speaker 1: And then there are the most more basic ones that
30:31
Speaker 1: they're just like, you know, a smiling face or the
30:33
Speaker 1: O face or what have you, that we can take
30:36
Speaker 1: and understand more universally. But then they're you know, in
30:39
Speaker 1: these sets that you go real deep and they're like
30:41
Speaker 1: foods that maybe we're not super familiar with or just
30:44
Speaker 1: just I can't think of a specific example right now,
30:46
Speaker 1: can you? Yeah? Gestures? And I'm really glad you mentioned this,
30:49
Speaker 1: because while it is easier to communicate across languages and emoji,
30:54
Speaker 1: it's not instant fluency. It's very culturally dependent. So in
30:58
Speaker 1: the Western world, or let's call it Abramaic religions from
31:03
Speaker 1: Judeo Christian values, uh, the folded hands like this are
31:08
Speaker 1: seen as representing prayer. Japanese emoji users will see it
31:14
Speaker 1: as a salutation, and younger people from a secular background
31:19
Speaker 1: think about this. I think it's a high five. Isn't
31:22
Speaker 1: that interesting? Interesting? Or it could be just like kind
31:24
Speaker 1: of a wonder Twins united kind of I use it
31:27
Speaker 1: as thank you? Is that the common use in the
31:30
Speaker 1: In America, I use it as thank you or an
31:33
Speaker 1: ironic bless up nice with a hashtag. So we bring
31:39
Speaker 1: emoji up just to show that the story of the
31:44
Speaker 1: all capital shout is one piece of a larger tapestry,
31:49
Speaker 1: a tapestry that we as speakers of a language, as
31:52
Speaker 1: writers of a language, are helping to. We've collectively you're
31:59
Speaker 1: important or part of this. If you want the sebo
32:01
Speaker 1: colon to stay, then buy Gali. You have to fight
32:04
Speaker 1: for it. And if you want if you want to
32:06
Speaker 1: write entirely in emoji, the hieroglyphic of our time, then
32:10
Speaker 1: you have to fight for that as well, Because I mean,
32:12
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, communication is just about
32:15
Speaker 1: the message, not the medium for the most part, right,
32:18
Speaker 1: So whatever works, uh is pretty much fair game. Or
32:21
Speaker 1: at least that's the way it's seen with um texting
32:25
Speaker 1: and internet communication and all of this stuff that's led
32:28
Speaker 1: to where we are today. So what what is your
32:31
Speaker 1: preferred method for conveying emphasis in text? Let us know
32:37
Speaker 1: how you let your significant other know that you're not
32:40
Speaker 1: grumpy when you send them a matter of fact text
32:42
Speaker 1: to pick up some milk from the store, because I'm
32:45
Speaker 1: telling you it's so funny, like it's I do it
32:47
Speaker 1: myself where someone will send just text me okay, period
32:51
Speaker 1: or something and I'm like, WHOA, what did I do?
32:54
Speaker 1: You know? And it's so unreasonable. There's no you have
32:57
Speaker 1: no inclination that this person isn't angrier that you've done anything.
33:00
Speaker 1: But it's so easy to get in your own head
33:02
Speaker 1: about what could be going on that would lead them
33:05
Speaker 1: to send you such a terse text. Please help us,
33:09
Speaker 1: let us know. How do you communicate emphasis? How do
33:11
Speaker 1: you communicate levity? We want to know. Write us at
33:14
Speaker 1: ridiculous at how stuff works dot com. You can also
33:17
Speaker 1: hit us up on social media where we are Ridiculous
33:19
Speaker 1: History on Facebook, Twitter, and also Instagram. You can additionally,
33:25
Speaker 1: while you're on the internet, check out an excellent key
33:27
Speaker 1: and Peel sketch about the dangers of communication via text,
33:34
Speaker 1: similar to the Kids in the Whole sketch about the
33:37
Speaker 1: guy who doesn't know that he sounds sarcastic. Bonus points,
33:41
Speaker 1: friends and neighbors. If you can in your email show
33:45
Speaker 1: us the form that you prefer. Don't don't just tell
33:49
Speaker 1: us about it, do the whole thing. If you send
33:51
Speaker 1: an email that is entirely an emoji, we will decipher it.
33:56
Speaker 1: We have top people on the case, and one of
33:59
Speaker 1: those top people is Jesselyn Shields, who wrote the article
34:02
Speaker 1: shouty caps are a much older invention than you think
34:05
Speaker 1: for how stuff works dot Com. So thanks to Jesselyn
34:08
Speaker 1: for her contributions to this episode, and of course we
34:11
Speaker 1: would also like to thank our super producer Casey Pegram
34:15
Speaker 1: and Alex Williams who wrote our theme and most importantly
34:19
Speaker 1: picture and asterix around this next word you Thanks for
34:22
Speaker 1: listening so sparkly all of you, and be sure to
34:25
Speaker 1: join us next time for another episode of Ridiculous History.