April 6, 2024 • 37 mins
You've seen them before, whether in forwarded spam email, a strangely passionate TikTok comment: THE DREADED ALL-CAPS TYPER.Where does this practice come from? How did everyone agree that typing in ALL CAPS means you're yelling at someone via text? Join the gang in this classic episode as they... FIND OUT.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we've got We've got some exciting news for
you ridiculous historians. Noel, Max and Ben. We're doing a
we're doing some classic episodes.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Finally, what's this new piece of content in me feed?
Speaker 3 (00:14):
You may be asking yourself, possibly in all caps, texting
angrily to a friend or acquaintance or colleague, what are
these ridiculous history fellows up too?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Well, it's good news for you, my friends, mm.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Hmm, and for us as well. In celebration of April six,
Drowsy Driver Awareness.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Day, Yeah, Hostess.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Twinkie Day, National Siamese Cat Day, and of course New
Beers Eve, we're rolling out our classics on April six,
nol I want to give a shout out to our
friends Miles and Jack over at Daily Zeitgeist. They like
to shout out national days celebrations.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Just literally one like every day. Yeah calendar. It's so
weird and they get pretty weird and dumb, and then
dare we say ridiculous? Now?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Now, for now we have been talking in terms of like,
if you were reading an audio transcript ridiculous historians, you
would see most of this in lowercase letters. But true story.
Back in twenty eighteen, You and I and our fellow
our fellow colleagues, we asked ourselves a question, when did
(01:28):
all caps in type become the written version of yelling?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yeah. It's a good question, one that we attempt to answer.
Dare we say succeed in answering in this episode? By
the way, Ben, did you know that June first is
National Text Day? We kind of missed the boat on
that one. We're not very good at temple alignments, but
just thought I throw that out. There's death for everything.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
Also, guys, I just want to kind of jump in here.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
You jumping in? Yeah? I can? I just say real quick? Max.
We need to make a T shirt that says, I
just can I just jump in here real quick. It's
it's like a catch phrase. I love it. I'm here
for I'm just saying, but sorry, Matt, please jump in
by all means jump.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
Yeah, I'm jumping in to say that April sixth is
my birthday.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Jump jump all right? The Max, the Max Daddy makes.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
You just kidding, is not my birthday, but it is
coming up.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
The Daddy Max will make you jump jump ridiculous history
will make you jump. Gosh, we're roll roll the beautiful
bean footage. Here we go.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio Hello or Should
(02:57):
I Say Hello? Or Should I Say You could hear
the regular letters, the capitol letters, and possibly the italics.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
My name is Ben, My name is Nolan, Ben. Why
are you shouting at me?
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Oh? I'm shouting at our fellow friends and neighbors and listeners.
And we prepped our super producer, Casey Pegram because we
wanted him to know that someone was going to raise
their voice.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I do have to say, Ben, that was the most
low grade shout that I've ever heard. That was a
very gentle morning shout, and I appreciate that because it is,
after all nine am as we record this episode.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Yeah, hopefully we could get the point across, though, Nol.
Have you ever been in a moment, my old friend,
where you feel like you could picture what someone is
saying to you as though it were written down in text.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Sort of in like a comic bookie automatopoia kind of way. Yeah, sure, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Like somebody, somebody says something with a certain amount of
emphasis or shade, and you can picture the italics when
they say, oh that one.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
See. It's interesting that you flip it in that direction,
because when you look at it like that, yes, I
can get that tone, and I can picture a text
version of it. But when you flip the script and
look at the text only version, it is sometimes a
little tricky to get that nuance tone. Which is why
the fact that today people communicate more in the written
(04:24):
language than ever before is an interesting conundrum because a
lot is lost in translation, a lot of that tone
and nuance flies right out the window, and we get
a lot of cranky people that think that you're mad
at them when you send them a text without any
kind of signifiers of levity, right.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Right, And there's such a question that occurs because our
punctuation system is still evolving to properly convey tone. You've
heard of different attempts to, let's say, revise or clarify punctuation,
like the famous in Terra bang, which is a question
mark that is also an exclamation mark.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
I love that word.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Yeah, It's a word that could meet a lot of things,
and for our purposes, it describes this new attempt at punctuation.
And this all exists because it's so very easy to
misread text. You'll also hear the statistic that sometimes you'll
(05:21):
hear ninety percent, sometimes you'll hear seventy percent, or anywhere
in that ballpark, just as the majority of information conveyed
when you're talking to another person in person is actually
not verbal. And that's the reason why if you look
at a transcript of any conversation you have with any
of your friends or strangers on the street, you'll find
(05:43):
that the conversation itself doesn't make much sense. There are
a lot of ellipses, there are a few coherent sentences.
So when we are limited to a single form of communication,
a text only interface, we have to think very carefully
about what we say and how we type it.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah, I was talking about like little signifiers of levity,
Like some people depend on the exclamation marks. Some people
absolutely despise the exclamation mark. I am one that uses
it to show that I'm excited about something, and there
are some people that I think get it and some
people that it bugs the hell out of, like my girlfriend,
So I do not text her exclamation marks anymore. But
you know, there's emojis obviously you can use to show
(06:28):
that you're telling a joke or that you're, you know,
being light about something. But the all powerful shouty caps
is what today's episode is about. And it turns out
that it's got a history that goes way farther back
than just early Internet message boards and newsgroups, right, Ben, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Absolutely no, because we're all familiar with an Internet forum
where you see one person writing in all caps to
emphasize something, sometimes without an exclamation wark just very very loud,
and we have all seen these comments online before. Now.
(07:06):
I don't want to say these people because for Pete's
sake or for Polk's sake, we have all been these
people at some point when we are attempting to somehow
encapsulate the entirety of in person communication in a single
form of that communication.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Ben, you do not strike me as a text shouter.
You are far too eloquent for that. Say it ain't.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
So that's very kind, but I feel that it works
really well with some comedic things. There was only one
time in my life I ever did it seriously, and
I stand by you gotta pick your battles. So what
happened when we look at the state of communication. What's
(07:55):
strange is that in any Latin based language, so anything
that doesn't use idiograms, like a like an Eastern language.
Right in any Latin based language, it is known as
shouting if you use capital letters. We mentioned that this
goes further back than you might imagine, but how far
(08:16):
back does it go?
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, it's really interesting because you would think that this
is sort of a product of the Internet, like we
were talking about with those early message boards and stuff. But
as it turns out, according to a really cool piece
written on dot com, which I think started out as
like an e commerce site and then ended up being
more of a message board, a guy by the name
of Dave Fleischmann kind of delves into the evolution of
(08:41):
using all caps as this indicator of shouting, and he
actually found quite a few examples that date back hundreds
of years.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
As it turns out, Noel, I propose that as we
travel to meet mister Fleischmann, we go the long route
and stop by the Roman Empire first, courtesy of our
super producer's time machine.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
He is really a jack of all trades that Casey
pegri Mean produces at its Engineers has a segment on
the case with Casey, and as it turns out, as
a scientific genius and inventor of time machines, we are
some lucky dudes to be associated with this giant.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Do you notice that he doesn't go with us on
these jaunts through time and space?
Speaker 2 (09:29):
No, No, he has to be in the home base,
keeping an eye on things and making and he pulls
us out in a Star Trek style when things get.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Hairy, you gotta have a man at the switch. Right
here we are Roman Empire. Observe all the amazing architecture,
all the strange dress, all the written text.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I'm doing it. I'm observing it.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
And as we're looking at this architecture, let's observe all
these numerous written inscriptions, those capital letters. Capital letters evolved
in this time during the Roman Empire because the stonecutters
who made these monuments and made these buildings also made
(10:11):
inscriptions using large straight letters. They both were easily legible,
and they showed a grandiose nature. Right, they added some gravitas.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Ben.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
In fact, in an article from The New Republic by
Alice rob rob interviews Professor Paul Luna, who's the director
of the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the
University of Reading in the UK, and Luna cites that
the use of all caps was meant to convey grandeur, pomposity,
(10:46):
esthetic seriousness, and has been used that way for thousands
of years. As we're seeing with our very eyes during
this time travel tableau.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yes, and there's not a chicken and egg situation here,
which I find so fascinating. It is proven that what
we interpret is uppercase today did come before. Lowercase lowercase
became an adaptation of uppercase, the same way that Taken
(11:15):
started out as a film and is now a television adaptation.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
That's a really good way of looking at it. It's
true lowercase letters were developed more as a functional kind
of thing so that books could be written by hand.
In fact, it was during Charlemagne's Carolinian Renaissance, which happened
from the late eighth century to the ninth century, where
a group of monks under the leadership of Alcion of York,
(11:44):
who is an English scholar, created this Carolinian minuscule script
that would serve as the basis for what would become
the modern uppercase lowercase alphabet.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
We know today, right that sweet Sweet mixtape, that crossover,
that ven diagram where you can write every letter at
least two ways. Fast forward to Italy. By the time
movable type reaches Italy, this writing had evolved to that
consistent model. And if we check back with our friend
(12:15):
mister Fleischman, whom I would like to call Dave at
this point, are you okay with that? I'm okay with Dave,
all right.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
So it's one of the Daves we know.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
He's one of the Daves.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
We know.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
There are several days we know, but he is one.
Dave tells us that the first citation he can find
in the modern age for the use of all caps
for some sort of emphasis occurs in a Washington, DC
newspaper called The Evening Star, in an article that published
on February twenty eighth, eighteen fifty six. And there's a
(12:51):
use of air quotes here. Dave calls it a quote
hilarious dialect story about a Dutchman who appears to be
disease written. And we have the sentence here for you.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I had tell's you I've got there's smallpox, don't you
vetesh there's smallpox? This time he shouted it in capital.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Letters, and the capital letters there there smallpox are small pox.
And I think that was a great reading. Noel, we
want to say, we are not we are not doing
any sort of Dutch stereotype or Dutch.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
It isn't a bad Dutch Dutch voice named a Dutchman once.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Yeah, I don't think it was a bad Dutch voice.
But I want people to know that you were reading
it as it was written.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yes, yes, indeed, yes, indeed, as it turns out, I
think he was talking about a small box and not
small box. That's what it says in the article by
by Fleischmann. We've got a bunch of cool examples of
this from mister Fleischman. Another one is from eighteen seventy
from The Shamrock in Ireland, which published a multi part
(13:59):
fictional series called The Sore Grievance of Well Spanked John.
He was well spanked and at one point the narrator,
for whatever reason I'd like to get my hands on,
this is thrown into a basket of duck eggs. Must
have been a big basket.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yes, and we have the line here is shortly after
his aunt is told she must pay for this great
basket of duck eggs, twelve shillis and seven pence roared
my aunts in the biggest capital letters twelve and sevenpence.
Good gracious me, that is a hefty ticket price for
a basket of duckgs. But if it was big enough
(14:37):
for a grown.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Man to fall into, that actually seems like a pretty
good deal if he asked.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Me yes, or for anyone you know, don't. Isn't that
part of the American dream? A basket of duck eggs
big enough to fall in?
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Yeah? I like it, you know, sort of like a
metaphor for the good life, like a bowl of cherries,
a basket of duck eggs.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
There we go, and in the it's interesting because in
both of these cases there are capital letters, but they
apply to two different things. They have two different connotations,
which I would argue are readily apparent. In the Evening
Star example, as as Noel explained, their small pox is
(15:21):
humorous with its capitalization right, and we are laughing at
the character's voice because it meant small box, but they
said small pox. And in the second example, the capitalization
is on twelve and seven because the aunt is so
(15:41):
aghast at.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
This rapacious fee for that bastard duck egg. Next, we
have one that's really interesting because it comes from a
manual for the proper use of the language right. So
this is from eighteen eighty and the book was called
The Standard Speaker, an Elocutionist, and it says to readers
give some examples that the following selections are marked in
(16:03):
capital letters, which is in capital letters in this quote
as the appropriate place for shouting emphasis.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
And it uses an example of a fantastic poem by
Tennyson called the Charge of the Light Brigade. There are
other examples such as the enthusiasm of the shout in
capital letters or warning signals which flash up in front
of his eyes and shout in capital letters, slow down.
(16:31):
That's nineteen thirteen, and all of.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
These examples are from that piece Capital Crimes, Part one Shout, Shout,
Let it All Out, by our pal Dave Fleischmann. And
you can check this out yourself on man dot com.
Definitely worth a read, and it's two parts to boot.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And so we see these uses of language evolving in
different places, almost in different periods of time. And the
funny thing is that every single time pop up post
Roman era people know what it means. They know if
it's a joke when they're reading it, they know if
it's a very strong imperative sentence. You know or any
(17:10):
number of traffic signs that I have been in trouble
for violating.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
And we will get back to traffic signs a little
bit later. But you're absolutely correct. So I think all
of this talk we've been doing, we we've been doing
in the Roman era, so we should we should, we
should rewind back to the present.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Yeah, people are looking at us. Good call, good call, Hey, Casey,
thanks for pulling us back there. We we got a
just doing my job.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Not I know, but it was getting hairy and we
didn't He knew. He already knew. He had it queued
up and ready to go. He didn't even need us
to use the safe word, which is fidelia. That's your
safe word.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
I have a different one.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
He has a little confusing.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
What's up?
Speaker 2 (17:53):
He's a little confusing. We shouldn't shou should we just
sync up on safe words. I'm glad to use yours.
Oh oh, hey, you don't want to share it.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Wouldn't be safe.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
That's fair. We are in a president where the president
of the United States tweets using all caps, which is interesting.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Yes, interesting, and sets a precedent. We are watching linguistic
history evolve as we record today right. For Fleischmann, there's
a difference between shouting and signifying importance, right, And Fleischmann
does argue he's on the same page with us that
(18:34):
everyone alive today who uses nonline service understands that when
you use upper case you're shouting.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
It is kind of intuitive and it makes sense visually actually,
because Professor Paul Luna in that New Republic piece is
how he characterizes him quote all capitals provides visibility maximum
size within a given area. All caps in an email
looks like shouting because when someone shouting, you're aware of
the shout and not the nuance. All caps fills the space,
(19:05):
so there's an element of feeling that the message is
crowding out everything else. And this kind of comes back
to the idea that in general shouty caps is looked
at as kind of poor form and kind of rude
and almost a replacement for substance at times.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yeah, agreed, and a little bit outdated because it's associated
with perhaps a lack of familiarity with online communication in
this day and age. And found a very interesting thing here.
The original typewriters were all capital, were all uppercase letters,
(19:46):
meaning that if you had an older outdated keyboarder, typewriter,
something pre eighteen ninety four. So then the only letters
you could send would look like very loud telegrams.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
And it's funny because my mom texts this way to
this day. I'm not joking. She texts not all caps,
but there's no punctuation. But that has become kind of
a trope, right that if you are seen as using
all caps, you're either being rude and loud and shouty,
or like you said, you're using outdated technology and therefore
seen as being old school, or really just plain old.
(20:21):
And let's get back to our tweeting president. A guy
named Stephen Huxley who's the Chair of Communication and Media
at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. He says in
an article from The Washington Post that it's pretty unusual.
Highly unusual is how he phrases it, for a president
to rely on all caps in these public messages. And
(20:45):
that is because I'm gonna quote him, because it's perfect quote.
If your message is good, your message is clear, you
don't need to add emphasis. It's irrelevant. He says that
using all caps signals that there has been a communication
breakdown between the sender and the receiver, so it implies
that you're kind of struggling to communicate in a way.
(21:06):
And he uses the example of someone who is trying
to communicate with someone who speaks a foreign language and
repeats themselves, not only repeats themselves, but actually yeah, but
she shouts as though like the loudness of it will
make it easier to understand, which we all know is
absolutely not the case, and comes off as like WHOA,
get out of my face with that, you know. And
(21:28):
he says that it's poor form and it's rude, and
it's received as rude as it should be, kind of.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
And so if we ask where this spring from in
the modern age online, right, we know that we know
that beforehand it was relatively intuitive. Right, pay attention to
this is what that means, especially if you're looking at
a sentence where upper and lower case phrases are mixed together.
(22:00):
If you look at all of them, you're going, oh, no,
another forward email from one of my relatives or something.
In the online sphere, early Internet users would say this
interpretation of all caps is shouting like the current president
would go back to at least nineteen eighty four in March,
(22:21):
there was a fellow named Dave Deco DCOT who was
at the time a computer science student at Case Western
Reserve University. In a forum, he laid out what he
saw as three different types of communication through visual design,
(22:41):
right rather than content. He said that there were three
sorts of emphasis in use, and he ordered them in popularity.
So we're going to start at number three and go
up to the most popular. Number three, he said, was
SPACEC words out, putting a space between the S, the P,
(23:02):
the A, the CDI in G in spacing.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
And it's interesting because the spacing out words thing is
kind of stuck around, but more in an aesthetic way,
with like meme pages and message boards and tumbler like
as a way of kind of creating sort of a
fun aesthetic look like For example, there's a band that
I really like, an electronic band called Survive, and the
way their name is always printed is in all caps
(23:26):
with a space between every letter. So this actually combines it,
which is what he said it would do, spacing words out,
possibly accompanied by one and two on this list too,
being using asterisks to put sparklers around an emphasized word.
I've never heard that before. That's funny.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
So try to hear this is going to be a
fun experiment for everybody. Try to read that sentence again
and then put asterisks if you can verbally around one
of those words. And let's see if people can guess
which one it is.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Using asterisks to put sparklers around emphasized words.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I feel like that was pretty a parent, don't you.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I wish I had a way like verbally to make
my words sparkle.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
I think you do pretty well. I think we both do.
And number one, of course, is using capital letters to
make the word look louder.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
So this again dates back to a hardware issue, a
technological adaptation issue. We talked about early typewriters. I mentioned
the evolution from upper lowercase for typewriters, but there was
something similar that occurred with computer terminals.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Yeah, that's right. This message board post was just after
computer terminals switched from all upper case, like you're talking
about those old typewriters, to mixed case keyboards. So when
you've got the option of either writing in lowercase or
uppercase letters, or a mix of the two. The early
web thought that all caps was a great way to
communicate emphasis or shouting. But if you didn't know what
(24:58):
the the nettica I guess was, then using all caps
just made you seem old, like I was saying earlier,
this idea that you were not up to date on
the newer technology or the new Internet lingo.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Right. Yeah, As I pointed out with the typewriter's stuff,
the implication is that perhaps somebody is still bound by
pre existing or on updated technology, or as Noel mentioned,
perhaps they are not catching up on connectiquette. So Fleischmann
(25:34):
was pretty clear that the Internet did not invent this.
So every time you get that crazy email or that
strange text or that weird post in a forum where
somebody's saying something relatively normal, such as, I don't know,
peanut butter sandwiches are actually pretty good with bananas and
(25:55):
honey added, and it's all in caps, they might not
know that they're yelling at you. It's a real thing
and it existed before the Internet. They're smallpox. It's actually
it's actually a pretty good joke, and I like the
way Noel read it. And where does this leave us today?
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Well, in this article, how all caps came to signify
shouting as in Trump's see You in Court by Ben
Greno from The Washington Post. Guarna makes a really interesting
point about the evolution of language. He cites a quote
from Richard Stirling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
(26:41):
He spoke to The New York Times and was talking
about this idea that younger Internet users who've been brought
up with a much more casual attitude towards capitalization and punctuation,
how casual emails often are completely written in lowercase. And
he says, I think in the future capitalization will disappear.
(27:01):
And he says he doesn't think it's that worrying at all,
because language, as we've talked about in other episodes of
the show, can evolve and should be adaptable. But it's
interesting because there is actually has been sort of a
backlash against the caps lock key the key itself. Do
you know about this, Ben, This is really interesting.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Yeah. Absolutely, tell us about it well.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
In the New Republic article how capital letters became Internet
code for yelling, the author Alice rob spoke to a
man by the name of Matthew J. X Malady who
made it his life's work, or at least part of it.
To get rid of the caps lock key entirely, and
(27:45):
he told Slate quote the key is a nuisance, it's
prime real estate, leading us to depress it unintentionally and
often unwinningly. And the article also talks about a man
named Peter Hinchens who launched a campaign called caps off
in two thousand and six to get the key removed
(28:06):
from the keyboard entirely. It was not a successful effort
yet yet it is still around. But yeah, you know
you use the shift key. Why do you even need
caps lock? You just to hold down the shift key.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Hilarious part about the caps off campaign, by the way,
is that their slogan is stop shouting in all caps
in good riddance. The article by Christopher Beam on Slate.
They also note that Google, when they unveiled their Google
CR forty eight notebook, made the decision to ditch the
(28:41):
caps lock key. No way, Yeah, they took it out.
Oh man, you're going to have to hold down shift
ladies and gentlemen. And if you think about it, if
you're looking at if you're in the Western world, you're
probably working with a Querity computer named after the six
letters at the top left right. Then you can see
if you look at your keyboard now, if you have
one that caps like can shift are kind of redundant.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
You know, you ever noticed those little braille kind of
hash marks on the F and the J keys on keyboard?
Apparently those are meant to help you find the home
row touch type, you can touch type. I don't do that.
I didn't want to type like that. I just kind
of learned, you know, throw it into the fire and
just kind of figured it all out. I'm a child
of the Internet. This is neat, though, this movement away
from all caps, and this like seeing it as being
(29:27):
kind of ghost and like poor communication skills. It extends
to government agencies. As it turns out, the National Weather
Service had a history of using all caps and its
weather reports, and that was because the teletype machine that
had been historically used only communicated in capital letters. But
on April eleventh, the twenty sixteen, the National Weather Service
(29:49):
sent a press release in all caps that said, this
listen up. Beginning on May eleven, Noah's National Weather Service
forecasts will stop yelling at you.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
That's great. This is where we're at now. It appears
that the reign of all caps may be coming to
a close, as conecticuet evolves. But I argue there's something
greater at work here, and I want to see what
(30:21):
you think about this, Noel, because we see these backlashes
against the language changing English, the language we are speaking in.
In case anybody was listening and wondering what is this
strange sound? I understand English is a living language, which
means that it evolves by consensus. No matter how the
(30:44):
people at the OED or Oxford English Dictionary labor, ultimately,
the people who speak the language decide what the language
means and how it is best represented audibly or in type,
in some sort of physical form. What we're seeing, despite
the objection of the numerous so called grammar nazis, is
(31:05):
a move away from punctuation, and we're moving toward, or
should I say back toward an idiogrammatic sort of language.
With the rise of one of your favorite things, pal emoji.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
I'm a fan. You know. Our coworker Tristan, another super
producer in the house Stuff Works family, is a big
fan of communicating exclusively using emojis solely, and he only
chose like three, yeah, exactly, but somehow it gets the
idea across the O face emoji is the big one
(31:39):
he likes to use.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
And what we're noting here about the ideographic use of
emoji is that currently it seems really controversial. As we're
recording this, just a few years back, pretty recent in
the historical record, someone wrote a novel entirely an emoji,
which I have not read, so I cannot comment on it.
(32:01):
But there are a lot of faces in it. Ooh,
there's an eggplant. That might be the racy part here.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
There's a movie that's written all in emoji like a script. No,
it's the Emoji Movie. Okay, yes, really sad Casey Pegrim
will cringe at this. But Saudi Arabia recently lifted its
ban on public movie screenings and the first movie that
was available for public screening was the Emoji Movie.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
So emoji are popular, and what strange is that they're
approaching a universality and ubiquity. They're approaching something like a
common tongue. You and I don't have to speak Arabic
in order to understand a smiling face.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
It's true. But these sets of emoji graphics that come
stock on a lot of phones have their roots in Japan,
and so there are a lot of emojis that have
different meanings you know, to the Japanese and they do
to us. And then there are the most more basic
ones that are just like, you know, a smiling face
(33:06):
or the O face or what have you, that we
can take and understand more universally. But then there are
you know, in these sets that you go real deep in.
They're like foods that maybe we're not super familiar with
or just I can't think of a specific example right now,
can you? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Gestures? And I'm really glad you mentioned this, because while
it is easier to communicate across languages an emoji, it's
not instant fluency. It's very culturally dependent. So in the
Western world, or let's call it Abramaic religions Judeo Christian values,
the folded hands like this are seen as representing prayer.
(33:45):
Japanese emoji users will see it as a salutation, and
younger people from a secular background think about this, think
it's a high five. Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Interesting? Or it could be just like kind of a
wonder twins unite kind of. I use it as thank you?
Is that the common use in America?
Speaker 1 (34:04):
I use it as thank you or an ironic bless
up nice with a hashtag. So we bring emoji up
just to show that the story of the all capital
shout is one piece of a larger tapestry, a tapestry
that we as speakers of a language, as writers of
(34:26):
a language, are helping to weave collectively. You're important, You're
a part of this. If you want the semi colon
to stay, then by golly, you have to fight for it.
And if you want, if you want to write entirely
in emoji, the hieroglyphic of our time, then you have
to fight for that as well.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Because I mean, at the end of the day, communication
is just about the message, not the medium for the
most part, right, So whatever works is pretty much fair game,
or at least that's the way it's seen with texting
and internet communication and all of this stuff that's led
to where we are today. So what is your preferred
(35:05):
method for conveying emphasis in text? Let us know how
you let your significant other know that you're not grumpy
when you send them a matter of fact text to
pick up some milk from the store. Because I'm telling
you it's so funny, like it's I do it myself.
Where someone will just text me okay, period or something,
and I'm like, WHOA, what did I do? You know?
(35:28):
And it's so unreasonable. You have no inclination that this
person isn't angrier that you've done anything, But it's so
easy to get in your own head about what could
be going on that would lead them to send you
such a terse text. Please help us, let us know.
How do you communicate emphasis? How do you communicate levity?
We want to know. Write us at ridiculous at HowStuffWorks
(35:49):
dot com. You can also hit us up on social
media where we are Ridiculous History on Facebook, Twitter, and
also Instagram.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
You can additionally, while you're on the internet, check out
an excellent key and Peel sketch about the dangers of
communication via text, similar to the Kids in the Hall
sketch about the guy who doesn't know that he sounds sarcastic.
Bonus points, friends and neighbors. If you can, in your
(36:17):
email show us the form that you prefer. Don't just
tell us about it, do the whole thing. If you
send an email that is entirely an emoji, we will
decipher it. We have top people on the case.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
One of those top people is Jesseln Shields, who wrote
the article shouty caps are a much older invention than
you think for HowStuffWorks dot Com. So thanks to Jesslin
for her contributions to this episode, and.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Of course we would also like to thank our super producer,
Casey Pegger.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
And Alex Williams, who wrote our theme.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
And most importantly, picture an asterisk around this next word you.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Thanks for listening so sparkly all of you, and be
sure to join us next time for another episode of
ridiculous History. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, we've got We've got some exciting news for
you ridiculous historians. Noel, Max and Ben. We're doing a
we're doing some classic episodes.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Finally, what's this new piece of content in me feed?
Speaker 3 (00:14):
You may be asking yourself, possibly in all caps, texting
angrily to a friend or acquaintance or colleague, what are
these ridiculous history fellows up too?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Well, it's good news for you, my friends, mm.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Hmm, and for us as well. In celebration of April six,
Drowsy Driver Awareness.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Day, Yeah, Hostess.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Twinkie Day, National Siamese Cat Day, and of course New
Beers Eve, we're rolling out our classics on April six,
nol I want to give a shout out to our
friends Miles and Jack over at Daily Zeitgeist. They like
to shout out national days celebrations.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Just literally one like every day. Yeah calendar. It's so
weird and they get pretty weird and dumb, and then
dare we say ridiculous? Now?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Now, for now we have been talking in terms of like,
if you were reading an audio transcript ridiculous historians, you
would see most of this in lowercase letters. But true story.
Back in twenty eighteen, You and I and our fellow
our fellow colleagues, we asked ourselves a question, when did
(01:28):
all caps in type become the written version of yelling?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yeah. It's a good question, one that we attempt to answer.
Dare we say succeed in answering in this episode? By
the way, Ben, did you know that June first is
National Text Day? We kind of missed the boat on
that one. We're not very good at temple alignments, but
just thought I throw that out. There's death for everything.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
Also, guys, I just want to kind of jump in here.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
You jumping in? Yeah? I can? I just say real quick? Max.
We need to make a T shirt that says, I
just can I just jump in here real quick. It's
it's like a catch phrase. I love it. I'm here
for I'm just saying, but sorry, Matt, please jump in
by all means jump.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
Yeah, I'm jumping in to say that April sixth is
my birthday.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Jump jump all right? The Max, the Max Daddy makes.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
You just kidding, is not my birthday, but it is
coming up.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
The Daddy Max will make you jump jump ridiculous history
will make you jump. Gosh, we're roll roll the beautiful
bean footage. Here we go.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio Hello or Should
(02:57):
I Say Hello? Or Should I Say You could hear
the regular letters, the capitol letters, and possibly the italics.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
My name is Ben, My name is Nolan, Ben. Why
are you shouting at me?
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Oh? I'm shouting at our fellow friends and neighbors and listeners.
And we prepped our super producer, Casey Pegram because we
wanted him to know that someone was going to raise
their voice.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I do have to say, Ben, that was the most
low grade shout that I've ever heard. That was a
very gentle morning shout, and I appreciate that because it is,
after all nine am as we record this episode.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Yeah, hopefully we could get the point across, though, Nol.
Have you ever been in a moment, my old friend,
where you feel like you could picture what someone is
saying to you as though it were written down in text.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Sort of in like a comic bookie automatopoia kind of way. Yeah, sure, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Like somebody, somebody says something with a certain amount of
emphasis or shade, and you can picture the italics when
they say, oh that one.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
See. It's interesting that you flip it in that direction,
because when you look at it like that, yes, I
can get that tone, and I can picture a text
version of it. But when you flip the script and
look at the text only version, it is sometimes a
little tricky to get that nuance tone. Which is why
the fact that today people communicate more in the written
(04:24):
language than ever before is an interesting conundrum because a
lot is lost in translation, a lot of that tone
and nuance flies right out the window, and we get
a lot of cranky people that think that you're mad
at them when you send them a text without any
kind of signifiers of levity, right.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Right, And there's such a question that occurs because our
punctuation system is still evolving to properly convey tone. You've
heard of different attempts to, let's say, revise or clarify punctuation,
like the famous in Terra bang, which is a question
mark that is also an exclamation mark.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
I love that word.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Yeah, It's a word that could meet a lot of things,
and for our purposes, it describes this new attempt at punctuation.
And this all exists because it's so very easy to
misread text. You'll also hear the statistic that sometimes you'll
(05:21):
hear ninety percent, sometimes you'll hear seventy percent, or anywhere
in that ballpark, just as the majority of information conveyed
when you're talking to another person in person is actually
not verbal. And that's the reason why if you look
at a transcript of any conversation you have with any
of your friends or strangers on the street, you'll find
(05:43):
that the conversation itself doesn't make much sense. There are
a lot of ellipses, there are a few coherent sentences.
So when we are limited to a single form of communication,
a text only interface, we have to think very carefully
about what we say and how we type it.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah, I was talking about like little signifiers of levity,
Like some people depend on the exclamation marks. Some people
absolutely despise the exclamation mark. I am one that uses
it to show that I'm excited about something, and there
are some people that I think get it and some
people that it bugs the hell out of, like my girlfriend,
So I do not text her exclamation marks anymore. But
you know, there's emojis obviously you can use to show
(06:28):
that you're telling a joke or that you're, you know,
being light about something. But the all powerful shouty caps
is what today's episode is about. And it turns out
that it's got a history that goes way farther back
than just early Internet message boards and newsgroups, right, Ben, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Absolutely no, because we're all familiar with an Internet forum
where you see one person writing in all caps to
emphasize something, sometimes without an exclamation wark just very very loud,
and we have all seen these comments online before. Now.
(07:06):
I don't want to say these people because for Pete's
sake or for Polk's sake, we have all been these
people at some point when we are attempting to somehow
encapsulate the entirety of in person communication in a single
form of that communication.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Ben, you do not strike me as a text shouter.
You are far too eloquent for that. Say it ain't.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
So that's very kind, but I feel that it works
really well with some comedic things. There was only one
time in my life I ever did it seriously, and
I stand by you gotta pick your battles. So what
happened when we look at the state of communication. What's
(07:55):
strange is that in any Latin based language, so anything
that doesn't use idiograms, like a like an Eastern language.
Right in any Latin based language, it is known as
shouting if you use capital letters. We mentioned that this
goes further back than you might imagine, but how far
(08:16):
back does it go?
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, it's really interesting because you would think that this
is sort of a product of the Internet, like we
were talking about with those early message boards and stuff. But
as it turns out, according to a really cool piece
written on dot com, which I think started out as
like an e commerce site and then ended up being
more of a message board, a guy by the name
of Dave Fleischmann kind of delves into the evolution of
(08:41):
using all caps as this indicator of shouting, and he
actually found quite a few examples that date back hundreds
of years.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
As it turns out, Noel, I propose that as we
travel to meet mister Fleischmann, we go the long route
and stop by the Roman Empire first, courtesy of our
super producer's time machine.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
He is really a jack of all trades that Casey
pegri Mean produces at its Engineers has a segment on
the case with Casey, and as it turns out, as
a scientific genius and inventor of time machines, we are
some lucky dudes to be associated with this giant.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Do you notice that he doesn't go with us on
these jaunts through time and space?
Speaker 2 (09:29):
No, No, he has to be in the home base,
keeping an eye on things and making and he pulls
us out in a Star Trek style when things get.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Hairy, you gotta have a man at the switch. Right
here we are Roman Empire. Observe all the amazing architecture,
all the strange dress, all the written text.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I'm doing it. I'm observing it.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
And as we're looking at this architecture, let's observe all
these numerous written inscriptions, those capital letters. Capital letters evolved
in this time during the Roman Empire because the stonecutters
who made these monuments and made these buildings also made
(10:11):
inscriptions using large straight letters. They both were easily legible,
and they showed a grandiose nature. Right, they added some gravitas.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Ben.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
In fact, in an article from The New Republic by
Alice rob rob interviews Professor Paul Luna, who's the director
of the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the
University of Reading in the UK, and Luna cites that
the use of all caps was meant to convey grandeur, pomposity,
(10:46):
esthetic seriousness, and has been used that way for thousands
of years. As we're seeing with our very eyes during
this time travel tableau.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yes, and there's not a chicken and egg situation here,
which I find so fascinating. It is proven that what
we interpret is uppercase today did come before. Lowercase lowercase
became an adaptation of uppercase, the same way that Taken
(11:15):
started out as a film and is now a television adaptation.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
That's a really good way of looking at it. It's
true lowercase letters were developed more as a functional kind
of thing so that books could be written by hand.
In fact, it was during Charlemagne's Carolinian Renaissance, which happened
from the late eighth century to the ninth century, where
a group of monks under the leadership of Alcion of York,
(11:44):
who is an English scholar, created this Carolinian minuscule script
that would serve as the basis for what would become
the modern uppercase lowercase alphabet.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
We know today, right that sweet Sweet mixtape, that crossover,
that ven diagram where you can write every letter at
least two ways. Fast forward to Italy. By the time
movable type reaches Italy, this writing had evolved to that
consistent model. And if we check back with our friend
(12:15):
mister Fleischman, whom I would like to call Dave at
this point, are you okay with that? I'm okay with Dave,
all right.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
So it's one of the Daves we know.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
He's one of the Daves.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
We know.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
There are several days we know, but he is one.
Dave tells us that the first citation he can find
in the modern age for the use of all caps
for some sort of emphasis occurs in a Washington, DC
newspaper called The Evening Star, in an article that published
on February twenty eighth, eighteen fifty six. And there's a
(12:51):
use of air quotes here. Dave calls it a quote
hilarious dialect story about a Dutchman who appears to be
disease written. And we have the sentence here for you.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
I had tell's you I've got there's smallpox, don't you
vetesh there's smallpox? This time he shouted it in capital.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Letters, and the capital letters there there smallpox are small pox.
And I think that was a great reading. Noel, we
want to say, we are not we are not doing
any sort of Dutch stereotype or Dutch.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
It isn't a bad Dutch Dutch voice named a Dutchman once.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Yeah, I don't think it was a bad Dutch voice.
But I want people to know that you were reading
it as it was written.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yes, yes, indeed, yes, indeed, as it turns out, I
think he was talking about a small box and not
small box. That's what it says in the article by
by Fleischmann. We've got a bunch of cool examples of
this from mister Fleischman. Another one is from eighteen seventy
from The Shamrock in Ireland, which published a multi part
(13:59):
fictional series called The Sore Grievance of Well Spanked John.
He was well spanked and at one point the narrator,
for whatever reason I'd like to get my hands on,
this is thrown into a basket of duck eggs. Must
have been a big basket.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yes, and we have the line here is shortly after
his aunt is told she must pay for this great
basket of duck eggs, twelve shillis and seven pence roared
my aunts in the biggest capital letters twelve and sevenpence.
Good gracious me, that is a hefty ticket price for
a basket of duckgs. But if it was big enough
(14:37):
for a grown.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Man to fall into, that actually seems like a pretty
good deal if he asked.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
Me yes, or for anyone you know, don't. Isn't that
part of the American dream? A basket of duck eggs
big enough to fall in?
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Yeah? I like it, you know, sort of like a
metaphor for the good life, like a bowl of cherries,
a basket of duck eggs.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
There we go, and in the it's interesting because in
both of these cases there are capital letters, but they
apply to two different things. They have two different connotations,
which I would argue are readily apparent. In the Evening
Star example, as as Noel explained, their small pox is
(15:21):
humorous with its capitalization right, and we are laughing at
the character's voice because it meant small box, but they
said small pox. And in the second example, the capitalization
is on twelve and seven because the aunt is so
(15:41):
aghast at.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
This rapacious fee for that bastard duck egg. Next, we
have one that's really interesting because it comes from a
manual for the proper use of the language right. So
this is from eighteen eighty and the book was called
The Standard Speaker, an Elocutionist, and it says to readers
give some examples that the following selections are marked in
(16:03):
capital letters, which is in capital letters in this quote
as the appropriate place for shouting emphasis.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
And it uses an example of a fantastic poem by
Tennyson called the Charge of the Light Brigade. There are
other examples such as the enthusiasm of the shout in
capital letters or warning signals which flash up in front
of his eyes and shout in capital letters, slow down.
(16:31):
That's nineteen thirteen, and all of.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
These examples are from that piece Capital Crimes, Part one Shout, Shout,
Let it All Out, by our pal Dave Fleischmann. And
you can check this out yourself on man dot com.
Definitely worth a read, and it's two parts to boot.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And so we see these uses of language evolving in
different places, almost in different periods of time. And the
funny thing is that every single time pop up post
Roman era people know what it means. They know if
it's a joke when they're reading it, they know if
it's a very strong imperative sentence. You know or any
(17:10):
number of traffic signs that I have been in trouble
for violating.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
And we will get back to traffic signs a little
bit later. But you're absolutely correct. So I think all
of this talk we've been doing, we we've been doing
in the Roman era, so we should we should, we
should rewind back to the present.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Yeah, people are looking at us. Good call, good call, Hey, Casey,
thanks for pulling us back there. We we got a
just doing my job.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Not I know, but it was getting hairy and we
didn't He knew. He already knew. He had it queued
up and ready to go. He didn't even need us
to use the safe word, which is fidelia. That's your
safe word.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
I have a different one.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
He has a little confusing.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
What's up?
Speaker 2 (17:53):
He's a little confusing. We shouldn't shou should we just
sync up on safe words. I'm glad to use yours.
Oh oh, hey, you don't want to share it.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Wouldn't be safe.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
That's fair. We are in a president where the president
of the United States tweets using all caps, which is interesting.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Yes, interesting, and sets a precedent. We are watching linguistic
history evolve as we record today right. For Fleischmann, there's
a difference between shouting and signifying importance, right, And Fleischmann
does argue he's on the same page with us that
(18:34):
everyone alive today who uses nonline service understands that when
you use upper case you're shouting.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
It is kind of intuitive and it makes sense visually actually,
because Professor Paul Luna in that New Republic piece is
how he characterizes him quote all capitals provides visibility maximum
size within a given area. All caps in an email
looks like shouting because when someone shouting, you're aware of
the shout and not the nuance. All caps fills the space,
(19:05):
so there's an element of feeling that the message is
crowding out everything else. And this kind of comes back
to the idea that in general shouty caps is looked
at as kind of poor form and kind of rude
and almost a replacement for substance at times.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yeah, agreed, and a little bit outdated because it's associated
with perhaps a lack of familiarity with online communication in
this day and age. And found a very interesting thing here.
The original typewriters were all capital, were all uppercase letters,
(19:46):
meaning that if you had an older outdated keyboarder, typewriter,
something pre eighteen ninety four. So then the only letters
you could send would look like very loud telegrams.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
And it's funny because my mom texts this way to
this day. I'm not joking. She texts not all caps,
but there's no punctuation. But that has become kind of
a trope, right that if you are seen as using
all caps, you're either being rude and loud and shouty,
or like you said, you're using outdated technology and therefore
seen as being old school, or really just plain old.
(20:21):
And let's get back to our tweeting president. A guy
named Stephen Huxley who's the Chair of Communication and Media
at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. He says in
an article from The Washington Post that it's pretty unusual.
Highly unusual is how he phrases it, for a president
to rely on all caps in these public messages. And
(20:45):
that is because I'm gonna quote him, because it's perfect quote.
If your message is good, your message is clear, you
don't need to add emphasis. It's irrelevant. He says that
using all caps signals that there has been a communication
breakdown between the sender and the receiver, so it implies
that you're kind of struggling to communicate in a way.
(21:06):
And he uses the example of someone who is trying
to communicate with someone who speaks a foreign language and
repeats themselves, not only repeats themselves, but actually yeah, but
she shouts as though like the loudness of it will
make it easier to understand, which we all know is
absolutely not the case, and comes off as like WHOA,
get out of my face with that, you know. And
(21:28):
he says that it's poor form and it's rude, and
it's received as rude as it should be, kind of.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
And so if we ask where this spring from in
the modern age online, right, we know that we know
that beforehand it was relatively intuitive. Right, pay attention to
this is what that means, especially if you're looking at
a sentence where upper and lower case phrases are mixed together.
(22:00):
If you look at all of them, you're going, oh, no,
another forward email from one of my relatives or something.
In the online sphere, early Internet users would say this
interpretation of all caps is shouting like the current president
would go back to at least nineteen eighty four in March,
(22:21):
there was a fellow named Dave Deco DCOT who was
at the time a computer science student at Case Western
Reserve University. In a forum, he laid out what he
saw as three different types of communication through visual design,
(22:41):
right rather than content. He said that there were three
sorts of emphasis in use, and he ordered them in popularity.
So we're going to start at number three and go
up to the most popular. Number three, he said, was
SPACEC words out, putting a space between the S, the P,
(23:02):
the A, the CDI in G in spacing.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
And it's interesting because the spacing out words thing is
kind of stuck around, but more in an aesthetic way,
with like meme pages and message boards and tumbler like
as a way of kind of creating sort of a
fun aesthetic look like For example, there's a band that
I really like, an electronic band called Survive, and the
way their name is always printed is in all caps
(23:26):
with a space between every letter. So this actually combines it,
which is what he said it would do, spacing words out,
possibly accompanied by one and two on this list too,
being using asterisks to put sparklers around an emphasized word.
I've never heard that before. That's funny.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
So try to hear this is going to be a
fun experiment for everybody. Try to read that sentence again
and then put asterisks if you can verbally around one
of those words. And let's see if people can guess
which one it is.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Using asterisks to put sparklers around emphasized words.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I feel like that was pretty a parent, don't you.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I wish I had a way like verbally to make
my words sparkle.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
I think you do pretty well. I think we both do.
And number one, of course, is using capital letters to
make the word look louder.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
So this again dates back to a hardware issue, a
technological adaptation issue. We talked about early typewriters. I mentioned
the evolution from upper lowercase for typewriters, but there was
something similar that occurred with computer terminals.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Yeah, that's right. This message board post was just after
computer terminals switched from all upper case, like you're talking
about those old typewriters, to mixed case keyboards. So when
you've got the option of either writing in lowercase or
uppercase letters, or a mix of the two. The early
web thought that all caps was a great way to
communicate emphasis or shouting. But if you didn't know what
(24:58):
the the nettica I guess was, then using all caps
just made you seem old, like I was saying earlier,
this idea that you were not up to date on
the newer technology or the new Internet lingo.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Right. Yeah, As I pointed out with the typewriter's stuff,
the implication is that perhaps somebody is still bound by
pre existing or on updated technology, or as Noel mentioned,
perhaps they are not catching up on connectiquette. So Fleischmann
(25:34):
was pretty clear that the Internet did not invent this.
So every time you get that crazy email or that
strange text or that weird post in a forum where
somebody's saying something relatively normal, such as, I don't know,
peanut butter sandwiches are actually pretty good with bananas and
(25:55):
honey added, and it's all in caps, they might not
know that they're yelling at you. It's a real thing
and it existed before the Internet. They're smallpox. It's actually
it's actually a pretty good joke, and I like the
way Noel read it. And where does this leave us today?
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Well, in this article, how all caps came to signify
shouting as in Trump's see You in Court by Ben
Greno from The Washington Post. Guarna makes a really interesting
point about the evolution of language. He cites a quote
from Richard Stirling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
(26:41):
He spoke to The New York Times and was talking
about this idea that younger Internet users who've been brought
up with a much more casual attitude towards capitalization and punctuation,
how casual emails often are completely written in lowercase. And
he says, I think in the future capitalization will disappear.
(27:01):
And he says he doesn't think it's that worrying at all,
because language, as we've talked about in other episodes of
the show, can evolve and should be adaptable. But it's
interesting because there is actually has been sort of a
backlash against the caps lock key the key itself. Do
you know about this, Ben, This is really interesting.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Yeah. Absolutely, tell us about it well.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
In the New Republic article how capital letters became Internet
code for yelling, the author Alice rob spoke to a
man by the name of Matthew J. X Malady who
made it his life's work, or at least part of it.
To get rid of the caps lock key entirely, and
(27:45):
he told Slate quote the key is a nuisance, it's
prime real estate, leading us to depress it unintentionally and
often unwinningly. And the article also talks about a man
named Peter Hinchens who launched a campaign called caps off
in two thousand and six to get the key removed
(28:06):
from the keyboard entirely. It was not a successful effort
yet yet it is still around. But yeah, you know
you use the shift key. Why do you even need
caps lock? You just to hold down the shift key.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Hilarious part about the caps off campaign, by the way,
is that their slogan is stop shouting in all caps
in good riddance. The article by Christopher Beam on Slate.
They also note that Google, when they unveiled their Google
CR forty eight notebook, made the decision to ditch the
(28:41):
caps lock key. No way, Yeah, they took it out.
Oh man, you're going to have to hold down shift
ladies and gentlemen. And if you think about it, if
you're looking at if you're in the Western world, you're
probably working with a Querity computer named after the six
letters at the top left right. Then you can see
if you look at your keyboard now, if you have
one that caps like can shift are kind of redundant.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
You know, you ever noticed those little braille kind of
hash marks on the F and the J keys on keyboard?
Apparently those are meant to help you find the home
row touch type, you can touch type. I don't do that.
I didn't want to type like that. I just kind
of learned, you know, throw it into the fire and
just kind of figured it all out. I'm a child
of the Internet. This is neat, though, this movement away
from all caps, and this like seeing it as being
(29:27):
kind of ghost and like poor communication skills. It extends
to government agencies. As it turns out, the National Weather
Service had a history of using all caps and its
weather reports, and that was because the teletype machine that
had been historically used only communicated in capital letters. But
on April eleventh, the twenty sixteen, the National Weather Service
(29:49):
sent a press release in all caps that said, this
listen up. Beginning on May eleven, Noah's National Weather Service
forecasts will stop yelling at you.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
That's great. This is where we're at now. It appears
that the reign of all caps may be coming to
a close, as conecticuet evolves. But I argue there's something
greater at work here, and I want to see what
(30:21):
you think about this, Noel, because we see these backlashes
against the language changing English, the language we are speaking in.
In case anybody was listening and wondering what is this
strange sound? I understand English is a living language, which
means that it evolves by consensus. No matter how the
(30:44):
people at the OED or Oxford English Dictionary labor, ultimately,
the people who speak the language decide what the language
means and how it is best represented audibly or in type,
in some sort of physical form. What we're seeing, despite
the objection of the numerous so called grammar nazis, is
(31:05):
a move away from punctuation, and we're moving toward, or
should I say back toward an idiogrammatic sort of language.
With the rise of one of your favorite things, pal emoji.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
I'm a fan. You know. Our coworker Tristan, another super
producer in the house Stuff Works family, is a big
fan of communicating exclusively using emojis solely, and he only
chose like three, yeah, exactly, but somehow it gets the
idea across the O face emoji is the big one
(31:39):
he likes to use.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
And what we're noting here about the ideographic use of
emoji is that currently it seems really controversial. As we're
recording this, just a few years back, pretty recent in
the historical record, someone wrote a novel entirely an emoji,
which I have not read, so I cannot comment on it.
(32:01):
But there are a lot of faces in it. Ooh,
there's an eggplant. That might be the racy part here.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
There's a movie that's written all in emoji like a script. No,
it's the Emoji Movie. Okay, yes, really sad Casey Pegrim
will cringe at this. But Saudi Arabia recently lifted its
ban on public movie screenings and the first movie that
was available for public screening was the Emoji Movie.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
So emoji are popular, and what strange is that they're
approaching a universality and ubiquity. They're approaching something like a
common tongue. You and I don't have to speak Arabic
in order to understand a smiling face.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
It's true. But these sets of emoji graphics that come
stock on a lot of phones have their roots in Japan,
and so there are a lot of emojis that have
different meanings you know, to the Japanese and they do
to us. And then there are the most more basic
ones that are just like, you know, a smiling face
(33:06):
or the O face or what have you, that we
can take and understand more universally. But then there are
you know, in these sets that you go real deep in.
They're like foods that maybe we're not super familiar with
or just I can't think of a specific example right now,
can you? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (33:20):
Gestures? And I'm really glad you mentioned this, because while
it is easier to communicate across languages an emoji, it's
not instant fluency. It's very culturally dependent. So in the
Western world, or let's call it Abramaic religions Judeo Christian values,
the folded hands like this are seen as representing prayer.
(33:45):
Japanese emoji users will see it as a salutation, and
younger people from a secular background think about this, think
it's a high five. Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Interesting? Or it could be just like kind of a
wonder twins unite kind of. I use it as thank you?
Is that the common use in America?
Speaker 1 (34:04):
I use it as thank you or an ironic bless
up nice with a hashtag. So we bring emoji up
just to show that the story of the all capital
shout is one piece of a larger tapestry, a tapestry
that we as speakers of a language, as writers of
(34:26):
a language, are helping to weave collectively. You're important, You're
a part of this. If you want the semi colon
to stay, then by golly, you have to fight for it.
And if you want, if you want to write entirely
in emoji, the hieroglyphic of our time, then you have
to fight for that as well.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Because I mean, at the end of the day, communication
is just about the message, not the medium for the
most part, right, So whatever works is pretty much fair game,
or at least that's the way it's seen with texting
and internet communication and all of this stuff that's led
to where we are today. So what is your preferred
(35:05):
method for conveying emphasis in text? Let us know how
you let your significant other know that you're not grumpy
when you send them a matter of fact text to
pick up some milk from the store. Because I'm telling
you it's so funny, like it's I do it myself.
Where someone will just text me okay, period or something,
and I'm like, WHOA, what did I do? You know?
(35:28):
And it's so unreasonable. You have no inclination that this
person isn't angrier that you've done anything, But it's so
easy to get in your own head about what could
be going on that would lead them to send you
such a terse text. Please help us, let us know.
How do you communicate emphasis? How do you communicate levity?
We want to know. Write us at ridiculous at HowStuffWorks
(35:49):
dot com. You can also hit us up on social
media where we are Ridiculous History on Facebook, Twitter, and
also Instagram.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
You can additionally, while you're on the internet, check out
an excellent key and Peel sketch about the dangers of
communication via text, similar to the Kids in the Hall
sketch about the guy who doesn't know that he sounds sarcastic.
Bonus points, friends and neighbors. If you can, in your
(36:17):
email show us the form that you prefer. Don't just
tell us about it, do the whole thing. If you
send an email that is entirely an emoji, we will
decipher it. We have top people on the case.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
One of those top people is Jesseln Shields, who wrote
the article shouty caps are a much older invention than
you think for HowStuffWorks dot Com. So thanks to Jesslin
for her contributions to this episode, and.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Of course we would also like to thank our super producer,
Casey Pegger.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
And Alex Williams, who wrote our theme.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
And most importantly, picture an asterisk around this next word you.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Thanks for listening so sparkly all of you, and be
sure to join us next time for another episode of
ridiculous History. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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