January 16, 2018 • 34 mins
You've seen them before, whether in a forwarded spam email, a strangely passionate Facebook post or a weirdly emphatic comment on your favorite website: THE DREADED ALL-CAPS TYPER. But where does this practice come from? How did everyone agree that typing in ALL CAPS means you're yelling at someone via text? Tune in to... FIND OUT.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
Hello, or should I say hello? Or should I say hello?
You could hear the regular letters, the capital letters, and
possibly the italics. My name is Ben, my name is
Nolan Ben. Why are you shouting at me? Oh? I'm
shouting at our fellow friends and neighbors and listeners. And
we prepped our super producer Casey Pegrum because we wanted
(00:47):
him to know that someone was going to raise their voice.
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. Yeah,
hopefully we could get the point across though. Null. Have
you ever been in a moment, my old friend, where
you feel like you could picture what someone is saying
(01:11):
to you as though it were written down in text,
sort of in like a comic bookie automotopeia kind of way. Yeah, sure, yeah,
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. See. It's interesting that you
flip it in that direction, because when you when you
(01:32):
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 nuanced tone, which is why the fact that today
people communicate more in the written language than ever before
(01:53):
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 of levity,
right right, And there's such a question that occurs because
our punctuation system is still evolving to properly convey tone.
(02:16):
You've heard of different attempts to, let's say, revise or
clarify punctuation, like the famous and terra bang, which is
a question mark that is also an exclamation mark. I
love that word. It's uh. It's a word that can
meet a lot of things, uh, and for our purposes,
it describes this uh new attempt at punctuation. And this
(02:38):
all exists because it's so very easy to misread text.
You'll also hear the statistic that is, sometimes you'll hear
sometimes you'll hear seventy 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
(03:01):
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 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,
(03:26):
we have to think very carefully about what we say
and how we type it. Yeah, I was talking about
like little signifiers of levity. Like some people, uh depend
on the exclamation mark. 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
(03:47):
hell out of, like my girlfriend. So I do not
text your exclamation marks anymore. But you know, you there's
there's emojis obviously you can use to show 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
(04:09):
early Internet message boards and newsgroups. Right then, Yeah, 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 mark, just very very loud. And
(04:29):
we have all seen these comments online before. Now. 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
(04:53):
of that communication. Man, you do not strike me as
a text shouter. You're far too eloquent for that. Say
it ain't. So that's very kind, but I feel that
it works really well with some comedic things. Uh, there
was only one time in my life I ever did
it seriously, and I stand by. You gotta pick your battles.
(05:16):
So what happened when we look at the state of communication?
What strange is that in any Latin based language, So
anything that doesn't use idiograms, like like an Eastern language, right,
in any Latin based language is known as shouting if
(05:36):
you use capital letters. We mentioned that this goes further
back than you might imagine, but how far back does
it go? Yeah, it's really interesting because you would think
that this is sort of a product of the Internet,
like we're talking about with those early message boards stuff.
But as it turns out, according to a really cool
piece written on math dot com, which I think started
(05:58):
out as like e commerce site and then ended up
being more of a message board, a guy by the
name of Dave Fleischman kind of delves into the evolution
of using all caps as this indicator of shouting, and
he actually found quite a few examples that date back
hundreds of years. As it turns out, No, I propose
(06:19):
that as we travel to meet Mr Fleischman, we go
the long route and stop by the Roman Empire first,
courtesy of our super producers time machine. He is really
a jack of all trade that Casey Pegraman produces at
(06:39):
its engineers has a segment on the case with Casey
and as it turns out, is a scientific genius and
inventor of time machines. We are some lucky dudes to
be associated with this giant. Do you notice that he
doesn't go with us on these jaunts through time and space. No, no,
he has to be in the home base, keeping an
eye on things and make and he pulls us out
(07:01):
like Star Trek style when things get hairy. I 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. I'm doing it. I'm observing it.
And as we're looking at this architecture, let's observe all
(07:22):
these numerous written inscriptions. Those are capital letters. Capital letters
evolved in this time during the Roman Empire because the
stone cutters who made these monuments and made these buildings
also made inscriptions using large, straight letters. They both were
(07:43):
easily legible, and they showed grandiose nature. Right, they added
some gravitas, that's right. Ben. In fact, in an article
from The New Republic by Alice Rob, rob interviews Professor
Paul Luna, who's the director of the Department Typography and
Graphic Communication at the University of Reading in the UK,
(08:04):
and Luna cites that the use of all caps was
meant to convey grandeur, pomposity, aesthetic seriousness, and has been
used that way for thousands of years, as we're seeing
with our very eyes during this time travel tableau. Yes,
and there's not a chicken and egg situation here, which
(08:26):
I find so fascinating. It is proven that what we
interpret his upper case today did come before lower case.
Lower case became an adaptation of upper case, the same
way that Taken started out as a film and is
now a television adaptation. That's a really good way of
(08:48):
looking at it. It's true, um lower case letters were
developed more um as as a functional kind of thing
so that the books could be written by hand. In fact,
it was during shar Arle Maine's Carolinian Renaissance, which happened
from the late eighth century to the ninth century UM,
where a group of monks under the leadership of Alcon
(09:10):
of York, who is an English scholar, um created this
Carolinian minuscule script that would serve as the basis for
what would become the modern upper case lower case alphabet
we know today, right that sweet Sweet mixtape, that crossover
that then diagram where you can write every letter at
least two ways. Fast forward to Italy. By the time
(09:33):
movable type reaches Italy, this writing had evolved to that
consistent model. And if we check back with our friend
Mr Fleishman, whom I would like to call Dave at
this point, are you okay with that? Okay with Dave? Right?
So it's one of the Dames. We know. He's one
of the Daves. We know. There are several days we know,
but he is one. Dave tells us that the first
(09:56):
citation he can find in the modern age for the
use of all caps for some sort of emphasis occurs
in a Washington, d c. Newspaper called The Evening Star,
in an article that published on February eighteen fifty six,
and it's a there's a use of air quotes here.
(10:20):
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. Idells you I've got the smallpox,
don't you vettesh death smallpox? This time he shouted it
in capital letters, and the capital letters there that's my pox,
(10:40):
are are small pox? And I think that was a
great reading. Noll. We we want to say we are
not doing We're not doing any sort of Dutch stereotype
or Dutch. Isn't a bad Dutch Dutch voice sign into
a Dutchman. Yeah, I don't think it was a bad
Dutch voice. But I want people to know that you
(11:00):
were reading it as it was written. Yes, indeed, yes, indeed,
as it turns out, I think, Um, he was talking
about a small box and not small box. That's what
it says in the article by Bye Fleishman. Um. We've
got a bunch of cool examples of this from Mr Fleishman.
Another one is from eighteen seventy um from the Shamrock
(11:23):
in Ireland, which published a multi part fictional series called
The Sore Grievance of Well Spanked John. He was well spanked,
um 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, yes, and uh we have the line here.
(11:45):
Uh is shortly after his auentes told she must pay
for this great basket of duck eggs twelve shillings and
seven pence roared by ants and the biggest capital letters
twelve and seven pence. Good gracious me, that is a
hefty ticket price for a basket duck ages. But if
it was big enough for a grown man to fall into,
(12:05):
that actually seems like a pretty good deal, yes, or
uh for anyone you know, don't. Isn't that part of
the American dream? A basket of duck eggs big enough
to fall in? 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. There we go,
and in the it's interesting because in both of these
(12:27):
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 smallpox is humorous with its capitalization, right,
(12:50):
and we are laughing at the character's voice because it
meant small box, but they said small pox. And in
a second example, the capitalization is on twelve and seven
because the aunt is so aghast at this rapacious fee
(13:11):
for the past dug um. 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
and elocutionist, and it says to readers um. It gives
some examples that the following selections are marked in capital letters,
which is in capital letters in this quote UM as
(13:34):
the appropriate place for shouting emphasis. And it uses UH
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 shouting capital letters or warning
signals which flash up in front of his eyes and
(13:55):
shouting capital letters slow down. That's and all of these
amples are from that piece Capital Crimes, Part one Shout Shout,
Let it All Out, by our pal Dave Fleishman UM
and you can check this out yourself on Matt dot com.
Definitely worth a read, and it's two parts to boot.
And so we see these uses of language evolving in
(14:19):
different places, almost in different periods of time. And the
funny thing is that every single time they 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 number of traffic signs that I have been in
(14:41):
trouble for violating 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've
we've been doing in the Roman era, so we should, uh,
we should we should rewind back to the present. Yeah,
people are looking at us. Could call good call hey, Casey.
(15:01):
Thanks for pulling us back there. He we we got
a just doing my job, not I know, but it
was getting harry and we didn't he knew, he already knew.
He had a cute up and ready to go. He
didn't even need us to use the safe word, which
is fidelio. That's your safe word. I have a different one.
He has a little confusing what's that? Because a little confusing?
We should should should we just sync up on safe words.
(15:23):
I'm glad to use yours? Oh hey, you don't want
to share it wouldn't be safe. We're in a president
where the president of the United States tweets using all caps,
which is interesting, yes, interesting, and sets a precedent. We
(15:44):
are watching linguistic history evolve as we record today. Right uh.
For Fleishman, there's a difference between shouting and signifying importance,
right uh, And Fleishman does are you He's on the
same page with us that everyone alive today who uses
no online service understands that when you use upper case
(16:07):
you're shouting. It is kind of intuitive and it makes
sense visually actually, because Professor Paul luna Um in that
New Republic piece is how he characterizes it. Quote all
capitals provides visibility, maximum size within a given area. All
caps in an email looks like shouting, because when someone
is shouting, you're aware of the shout and not the nuance.
(16:30):
All caps fills the space, 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 his kind of poor form
and and kind of rude and almost a replacement for
substance at times. Yeah, agreed, and a little bit outdated
(16:54):
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
we're all upper case letters, meaning that if you had
an older, outdated keyboarder typewriter, something pre eight ten, nine four,
(17:20):
So then the only letters you could send would look
like very loud telegrams. 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
(17:42):
outdated technology and therefore seen as being old school, or
really just plain Hold and let's get back to our
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 uh that it's pretty unusual. Highly unusual is how
(18:05):
he phrases it, for a president to rely on all
caps um in these public messages. And that is because
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. Um. He says that using all caps signals
that there has been a communication breakdown between the sender
(18:28):
and the receiver, So it implies that you're kind of
struggling to communicate in a way, and he uses the
example of someone who is trying to communicate with someone
who speaks of foreign language and repeats themselves, not only
repeats themselves, but actually as though like the loudness of
it will make it easier to understand, which we all
(18:49):
know is absolutely not the case, and comes off as
like WHOA, get out of my face with that, you know,
And he says that it's poor form and it's rude,
and it's received eaved as route as it should be
kind of. And so if we if we ask where
this spring from in the modern age online, right, we
(19:12):
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. 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
(19:36):
users would say this interpretation of all caps is shouting
like the current president would go back to at least
in March, there was a fellow named Dave Daco d
E c O T who was at the time a
computer science student at Case Western Reserve University. In a forum,
(19:58):
he aid out what he saw as three different types
of UM communication through visual design, right rather than content.
He said that there were three sorts of emphasis in use,
and he ordered them in popularity. So we're gonna start
at number three and go up to the most popular.
(20:21):
Number three, he said, was space c words out uh,
you know, putting a space between the S, the P,
the A, the CD, I, n G in spacing. 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 tumblr like as
(20:42):
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 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
to being using asterisks to put sparklers around an emphasized word.
(21:06):
I've never heard that before, so try to hear. This
is going to be a fun experiment for everybody. Try
to read that sentence again and then put asterix if
you can verbally around one of those words, and let's
see if people can guess which one it is. Using
asterisks to put sparklers around emphasized words. I feel like
that was pretty apparent, don't you. I wish I had
(21:28):
a way like verbally to make my words sparkle. 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. It's true. So this again
dates back to hardware issue, a technological adaptation issue. We
(21:51):
talked about early typewriters. I mentioned the evolution from upper
lower case for typewriters, but there was something similar that
occurred with computer terminals. Yeah that's right. Um, 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. Um, so when you've got the option
(22:13):
of your writing in lower case or uper case 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 the the
necticut I guess was, um, then using all caps just
made you seem old, Like I was saying earlier, this
(22:33):
idea that you were not up to date on the
newer technology um or the new uh internet lingo? Right yeah,
As as I pointed out with the typewriter's stuff, the
implication is that perhaps somebody is still bound by pre
existing or un updated technology, or as Nuel mentioned, perhaps
(22:55):
they are not catching up on netiquet. So Fleishman was
pretty clear that the Internet did not invent this. So
every time you get that crazy email or that strange
text store, that that weird post in a forum where
somebody's saying something relatively normal such as, I don't know, um,
(23:19):
peanut butter sandwiches are actually pretty good with bananas and
honey added, and it's all in caps. They might not
know that they're yelling at you. It's it's a real
thing and it existed before the Internet. They're smallpox. Sorry,
it's actually it's actually a pretty good joke, and I
(23:39):
like the way Noel read it. And where does this
leave us today? Well? Um, 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, Guarino
makes a really interesting point about the evolution of language.
(24:02):
He cites a quote from Richard Sterling, who teaches at
the University of California, Berkeley. He spoke the New York Times,
and I was talking about this idea that younger Internet
users who have been brought up with a much more
casual attitude towards capitalization and punctuation, how casual emails often
are completely written in lower case. And he says, I
(24:24):
think in the future capitalization will disappear. 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 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
(24:47):
know about this, Ben, This is really interesting. Yeah, absolutely,
tell us about it well. Um. In the New Republic
article how capitalitters 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
(25:09):
the caps lock key entirely. And 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 Hinens who
launched a campaign called caps off in two thousand six
(25:31):
uh to get the key removed 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. Hilarious part about the caps
off campaign, by the way, is that their slogan is
stop shouting in all caps uh in in good riddance uh.
(25:56):
The article by Christopher Beam on Slate UH. They also
note that Google, when they unveiled their Google CR forty
eight notebook, made the decision to ditch the cap slot 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
(26:17):
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 are kind of redundant. You know.
You even noticed those little brail kind of hash marks
on the F and the J keys on the keyboard.
Apparently those are meant to help you find the home
(26:40):
row touch type. You can touch type, and now I
don't do that. I didn't want to type like that.
I just kind of learned, you know, thrown into the
fire and just kind of figured it all out. I'm
a child of the Internet. Um, this is neat though,
this this movement away from all caps, and this like
seeing it as being kind of ghost and like poor
communication skills. It extends to government agency that It turns
(27:00):
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 eleven, the National Weather
Service UH sent a press release in all caps that
said this listen up. Beginning on May eleven, Noah's National
(27:24):
Weather Service forecasts will stop yelling at you. That's great.
This is where we're at now. It appears that the
ragn of all caps maybe coming to a close as
Nedicut evolves. But I argue there's something greater at work here,
(27:47):
and I want to see what you think about this,
because we we see these backlashes against the language changing English,
the language we were speaking 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,
(28:09):
no matter um how the people at the O E.
D 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. And now what we're seeing, despite
the objection of the numerous so called grammar nazis, is
(28:31):
a move away from punctuation, and we're moving toward or
should I say back toward an idio grammatic sort of language.
With the rise of one of your favorite things, pal emoji,
I'm a fan. You know. Our coworker Tristan, another superproducer
(28:52):
in the house Stuff Works family Um is a big
fan of 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.
He likes to use. And what we're noting here about
the idea graphic use of emoji is that currently it
(29:14):
seems really controversial. As we're recording this, just a few
years back, pretty recent in the historical record, someone wrote
a novel entirely in emoji, which I have not read,
so I cannot comment on it. But there are a
lot of faces in it. Oh, there's an eggplant. That
might be the racy part here. There's a movie that's
written all in emoji like a script. It's the Emoji Movie. Okay,
(29:39):
it's really sad. Casey Pegram 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. So emoji are popular, and what
strange is that they're approaching a universality and ubiquity. Uh,
(30:03):
they're approaching something like a common tongue. You and I
don't have to speak Arabic in order to understand a
smiling face. It's true. But these, uh, these sets of
emoji graphics that come stock on a lot of phones
have their roots in in Japan, and so there are
a lot of of of emojis that have different meanings
(30:26):
you know, to the Japanese and they do to us.
And then there are the most more basic ones that
they're just like, you know, a smiling face or the
O face or what have you, that we can take
and understand more universally. But then they're you know, in
these sets that you go real deep and they're like
foods that maybe we're not super familiar with or just
just I can't think of a specific example right now,
(30:46):
can you? Yeah? Gestures? And I'm really glad you mentioned this,
because while it is easier to communicate across languages and emoji,
it's not instant fluency. It's very culturally dependent. So in
the Western world, or let's call it Abramaic religions from
Judeo Christian values, uh, the folded hands like this are
(31:08):
seen as representing prayer. Japanese emoji users will see it
as a salutation, and younger people from a secular background
think about this. I think it's a high five. Isn't
that interesting? Interesting? Or it could be just like kind
of a wonder Twins united kind of I use it
as thank you? Is that the common use in the
(31:30):
In America, 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
(31:52):
writers of a language, are helping to. We've collectively you're
important or part of this. If you want the sebo
colon to stay, then buy Gali. 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, Because I mean,
at the end of the day, communication is just about
(32:15):
the message, not the medium for the most part, right,
So whatever works, uh is pretty much fair game. Or
at least that's the way it's seen with um texting
and internet communication and all of this stuff that's led
to where we are today. So what what is your
preferred method for conveying emphasis in text? Let us know
(32:37):
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 send just text me okay, period
or something and I'm like, WHOA, what did I do?
You know? And it's so unreasonable. There's no you have
(32:57):
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 how stuff works dot com. You can also
hit us up on social media where we are Ridiculous
(33:19):
History on Facebook, Twitter, and also Instagram. 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 Whole sketch about the
guy who doesn't know that he sounds sarcastic. Bonus points,
(33:41):
friends and neighbors. If you can in your email show
us the form that you prefer. Don't 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, and one of
those top people is Jesselyn Shields, who wrote the article
(34:02):
shouty caps are a much older invention than you think
for how stuff works dot Com. So thanks to Jesselyn
for her contributions to this episode, and of course we
would also like to thank our super producer Casey Pegram
and Alex Williams who wrote our theme and most importantly
picture and asterix around this next word you Thanks for
(34:22):
listening so sparkly all of you, and be sure to
join us next time for another episode of Ridiculous History.
Hello, or should I say hello? Or should I say hello?
You could hear the regular letters, the capital letters, and
possibly the italics. My name is Ben, my name is
Nolan Ben. Why are you shouting at me? Oh? I'm
shouting at our fellow friends and neighbors and listeners. And
we prepped our super producer Casey Pegrum because we wanted
(00:47):
him to know that someone was going to raise their voice.
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. Yeah,
hopefully we could get the point across though. Null. Have
you ever been in a moment, my old friend, where
you feel like you could picture what someone is saying
(01:11):
to you as though it were written down in text,
sort of in like a comic bookie automotopeia kind of way. Yeah, sure, yeah,
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. See. It's interesting that you
flip it in that direction, because when you when you
(01:32):
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 nuanced tone, which is why the fact that today
people communicate more in the written language than ever before
(01:53):
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 of levity,
right right, And there's such a question that occurs because
our punctuation system is still evolving to properly convey tone.
(02:16):
You've heard of different attempts to, let's say, revise or
clarify punctuation, like the famous and terra bang, which is
a question mark that is also an exclamation mark. I
love that word. It's uh. It's a word that can
meet a lot of things, uh, and for our purposes,
it describes this uh new attempt at punctuation. And this
(02:38):
all exists because it's so very easy to misread text.
You'll also hear the statistic that is, sometimes you'll hear
sometimes you'll hear seventy 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
(03:01):
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 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,
(03:26):
we have to think very carefully about what we say
and how we type it. Yeah, I was talking about
like little signifiers of levity. Like some people, uh depend
on the exclamation mark. 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
(03:47):
hell out of, like my girlfriend. So I do not
text your exclamation marks anymore. But you know, you there's
there's emojis obviously you can use to show 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
(04:09):
early Internet message boards and newsgroups. Right then, Yeah, 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 mark, just very very loud. And
(04:29):
we have all seen these comments online before. Now. 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
(04:53):
of that communication. Man, you do not strike me as
a text shouter. You're far too eloquent for that. Say
it ain't. So that's very kind, but I feel that
it works really well with some comedic things. Uh, there
was only one time in my life I ever did
it seriously, and I stand by. You gotta pick your battles.
(05:16):
So what happened when we look at the state of communication?
What strange is that in any Latin based language, So
anything that doesn't use idiograms, like like an Eastern language, right,
in any Latin based language is known as shouting if
(05:36):
you use capital letters. We mentioned that this goes further
back than you might imagine, but how far back does
it go? Yeah, it's really interesting because you would think
that this is sort of a product of the Internet,
like we're talking about with those early message boards stuff.
But as it turns out, according to a really cool
piece written on math dot com, which I think started
(05:58):
out as like e commerce site and then ended up
being more of a message board, a guy by the
name of Dave Fleischman kind of delves into the evolution
of using all caps as this indicator of shouting, and
he actually found quite a few examples that date back
hundreds of years. As it turns out, No, I propose
(06:19):
that as we travel to meet Mr Fleischman, we go
the long route and stop by the Roman Empire first,
courtesy of our super producers time machine. He is really
a jack of all trade that Casey Pegraman produces at
(06:39):
its engineers has a segment on the case with Casey
and as it turns out, is a scientific genius and
inventor of time machines. We are some lucky dudes to
be associated with this giant. Do you notice that he
doesn't go with us on these jaunts through time and space. No, no,
he has to be in the home base, keeping an
eye on things and make and he pulls us out
(07:01):
like Star Trek style when things get hairy. I 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. I'm doing it. I'm observing it.
And as we're looking at this architecture, let's observe all
(07:22):
these numerous written inscriptions. Those are capital letters. Capital letters
evolved in this time during the Roman Empire because the
stone cutters who made these monuments and made these buildings
also made inscriptions using large, straight letters. They both were
(07:43):
easily legible, and they showed grandiose nature. Right, they added
some gravitas, that's right. Ben. In fact, in an article
from The New Republic by Alice Rob, rob interviews Professor
Paul Luna, who's the director of the Department Typography and
Graphic Communication at the University of Reading in the UK,
(08:04):
and Luna cites that the use of all caps was
meant to convey grandeur, pomposity, aesthetic seriousness, and has been
used that way for thousands of years, as we're seeing
with our very eyes during this time travel tableau. Yes,
and there's not a chicken and egg situation here, which
(08:26):
I find so fascinating. It is proven that what we
interpret his upper case today did come before lower case.
Lower case became an adaptation of upper case, the same
way that Taken started out as a film and is
now a television adaptation. That's a really good way of
(08:48):
looking at it. It's true, um lower case letters were
developed more um as as a functional kind of thing
so that the books could be written by hand. In fact,
it was during shar Arle Maine's Carolinian Renaissance, which happened
from the late eighth century to the ninth century UM,
where a group of monks under the leadership of Alcon
(09:10):
of York, who is an English scholar, um created this
Carolinian minuscule script that would serve as the basis for
what would become the modern upper case lower case alphabet
we know today, right that sweet Sweet mixtape, that crossover
that then diagram where you can write every letter at
least two ways. Fast forward to Italy. By the time
(09:33):
movable type reaches Italy, this writing had evolved to that
consistent model. And if we check back with our friend
Mr Fleishman, whom I would like to call Dave at
this point, are you okay with that? Okay with Dave? Right?
So it's one of the Dames. We know. He's one
of the Daves. We know. There are several days we know,
but he is one. Dave tells us that the first
(09:56):
citation he can find in the modern age for the
use of all caps for some sort of emphasis occurs
in a Washington, d c. Newspaper called The Evening Star,
in an article that published on February eighteen fifty six,
and it's a there's a use of air quotes here.
(10:20):
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. Idells you I've got the smallpox,
don't you vettesh death smallpox? This time he shouted it
in capital letters, and the capital letters there that's my pox,
(10:40):
are are small pox? And I think that was a
great reading. Noll. We we want to say we are
not doing We're not doing any sort of Dutch stereotype
or Dutch. Isn't a bad Dutch Dutch voice sign into
a Dutchman. Yeah, I don't think it was a bad
Dutch voice. But I want people to know that you
(11:00):
were reading it as it was written. Yes, indeed, yes, indeed,
as it turns out, I think, Um, he was talking
about a small box and not small box. That's what
it says in the article by Bye Fleishman. Um. We've
got a bunch of cool examples of this from Mr Fleishman.
Another one is from eighteen seventy um from the Shamrock
(11:23):
in Ireland, which published a multi part fictional series called
The Sore Grievance of Well Spanked John. He was well spanked,
um 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, yes, and uh we have the line here.
(11:45):
Uh is shortly after his auentes told she must pay
for this great basket of duck eggs twelve shillings and
seven pence roared by ants and the biggest capital letters
twelve and seven pence. Good gracious me, that is a
hefty ticket price for a basket duck ages. But if
it was big enough for a grown man to fall into,
(12:05):
that actually seems like a pretty good deal, yes, or
uh for anyone you know, don't. Isn't that part of
the American dream? A basket of duck eggs big enough
to fall in? 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. There we go,
and in the it's interesting because in both of these
(12:27):
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 smallpox is humorous with its capitalization, right,
(12:50):
and we are laughing at the character's voice because it
meant small box, but they said small pox. And in
a second example, the capitalization is on twelve and seven
because the aunt is so aghast at this rapacious fee
(13:11):
for the past dug um. 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
and elocutionist, and it says to readers um. It gives
some examples that the following selections are marked in capital letters,
which is in capital letters in this quote UM as
(13:34):
the appropriate place for shouting emphasis. And it uses UH
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 shouting capital letters or warning
signals which flash up in front of his eyes and
(13:55):
shouting capital letters slow down. That's and all of these
amples are from that piece Capital Crimes, Part one Shout Shout,
Let it All Out, by our pal Dave Fleishman UM
and you can check this out yourself on Matt dot com.
Definitely worth a read, and it's two parts to boot.
And so we see these uses of language evolving in
(14:19):
different places, almost in different periods of time. And the
funny thing is that every single time they 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 number of traffic signs that I have been in
(14:41):
trouble for violating 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've
we've been doing in the Roman era, so we should, uh,
we should we should rewind back to the present. Yeah,
people are looking at us. Could call good call hey, Casey.
(15:01):
Thanks for pulling us back there. He we we got
a just doing my job, not I know, but it
was getting harry and we didn't he knew, he already knew.
He had a cute up and ready to go. He
didn't even need us to use the safe word, which
is fidelio. That's your safe word. I have a different one.
He has a little confusing what's that? Because a little confusing?
We should should should we just sync up on safe words.
(15:23):
I'm glad to use yours? Oh hey, you don't want
to share it wouldn't be safe. We're in a president
where the president of the United States tweets using all caps,
which is interesting, yes, interesting, and sets a precedent. We
(15:44):
are watching linguistic history evolve as we record today. Right uh.
For Fleishman, there's a difference between shouting and signifying importance,
right uh, And Fleishman does are you He's on the
same page with us that everyone alive today who uses
no online service understands that when you use upper case
(16:07):
you're shouting. It is kind of intuitive and it makes
sense visually actually, because Professor Paul luna Um in that
New Republic piece is how he characterizes it. Quote all
capitals provides visibility, maximum size within a given area. All
caps in an email looks like shouting, because when someone
is shouting, you're aware of the shout and not the nuance.
(16:30):
All caps fills the space, 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 his kind of poor form
and and kind of rude and almost a replacement for
substance at times. Yeah, agreed, and a little bit outdated
(16:54):
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
we're all upper case letters, meaning that if you had
an older, outdated keyboarder typewriter, something pre eight ten, nine four,
(17:20):
So then the only letters you could send would look
like very loud telegrams. 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
(17:42):
outdated technology and therefore seen as being old school, or
really just plain Hold and let's get back to our
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 uh that it's pretty unusual. Highly unusual is how
(18:05):
he phrases it, for a president to rely on all
caps um in these public messages. And that is because
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. Um. He says that using all caps signals
that there has been a communication breakdown between the sender
(18:28):
and the receiver, So it implies that you're kind of
struggling to communicate in a way, and he uses the
example of someone who is trying to communicate with someone
who speaks of foreign language and repeats themselves, not only
repeats themselves, but actually as though like the loudness of
it will make it easier to understand, which we all
(18:49):
know is absolutely not the case, and comes off as
like WHOA, get out of my face with that, you know,
And he says that it's poor form and it's rude,
and it's received eaved as route as it should be
kind of. And so if we if we ask where
this spring from in the modern age online, right, we
(19:12):
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. 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
(19:36):
users would say this interpretation of all caps is shouting
like the current president would go back to at least
in March, there was a fellow named Dave Daco d
E c O T who was at the time a
computer science student at Case Western Reserve University. In a forum,
(19:58):
he aid out what he saw as three different types
of UM communication through visual design, right rather than content.
He said that there were three sorts of emphasis in use,
and he ordered them in popularity. So we're gonna start
at number three and go up to the most popular.
(20:21):
Number three, he said, was space c words out uh,
you know, putting a space between the S, the P,
the A, the CD, I, n G in spacing. 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 tumblr like as
(20:42):
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 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
to being using asterisks to put sparklers around an emphasized word.
(21:06):
I've never heard that before, so try to hear. This
is going to be a fun experiment for everybody. Try
to read that sentence again and then put asterix if
you can verbally around one of those words, and let's
see if people can guess which one it is. Using
asterisks to put sparklers around emphasized words. I feel like
that was pretty apparent, don't you. I wish I had
(21:28):
a way like verbally to make my words sparkle. 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. It's true. So this again
dates back to hardware issue, a technological adaptation issue. We
(21:51):
talked about early typewriters. I mentioned the evolution from upper
lower case for typewriters, but there was something similar that
occurred with computer terminals. Yeah that's right. Um, 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. Um, so when you've got the option
(22:13):
of your writing in lower case or uper case 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 the the
necticut I guess was, um, then using all caps just
made you seem old, Like I was saying earlier, this
(22:33):
idea that you were not up to date on the
newer technology um or the new uh internet lingo? Right yeah,
As as I pointed out with the typewriter's stuff, the
implication is that perhaps somebody is still bound by pre
existing or un updated technology, or as Nuel mentioned, perhaps
(22:55):
they are not catching up on netiquet. So Fleishman was
pretty clear that the Internet did not invent this. So
every time you get that crazy email or that strange
text store, that that weird post in a forum where
somebody's saying something relatively normal such as, I don't know, um,
(23:19):
peanut butter sandwiches are actually pretty good with bananas and
honey added, and it's all in caps. They might not
know that they're yelling at you. It's it's a real
thing and it existed before the Internet. They're smallpox. Sorry,
it's actually it's actually a pretty good joke, and I
(23:39):
like the way Noel read it. And where does this
leave us today? Well? Um, 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, Guarino
makes a really interesting point about the evolution of language.
(24:02):
He cites a quote from Richard Sterling, who teaches at
the University of California, Berkeley. He spoke the New York Times,
and I was talking about this idea that younger Internet
users who have been brought up with a much more
casual attitude towards capitalization and punctuation, how casual emails often
are completely written in lower case. And he says, I
(24:24):
think in the future capitalization will disappear. 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 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
(24:47):
know about this, Ben, This is really interesting. Yeah, absolutely,
tell us about it well. Um. In the New Republic
article how capitalitters 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
(25:09):
the caps lock key entirely. And 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 Hinens who
launched a campaign called caps off in two thousand six
(25:31):
uh to get the key removed 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. Hilarious part about the caps
off campaign, by the way, is that their slogan is
stop shouting in all caps uh in in good riddance uh.
(25:56):
The article by Christopher Beam on Slate UH. They also
note that Google, when they unveiled their Google CR forty
eight notebook, made the decision to ditch the cap slot 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
(26:17):
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 are kind of redundant. You know.
You even noticed those little brail kind of hash marks
on the F and the J keys on the keyboard.
Apparently those are meant to help you find the home
(26:40):
row touch type. You can touch type, and now I
don't do that. I didn't want to type like that.
I just kind of learned, you know, thrown into the
fire and just kind of figured it all out. I'm
a child of the Internet. Um, this is neat though,
this this movement away from all caps, and this like
seeing it as being kind of ghost and like poor
communication skills. It extends to government agency that It turns
(27:00):
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 eleven, the National Weather
Service UH sent a press release in all caps that
said this listen up. Beginning on May eleven, Noah's National
(27:24):
Weather Service forecasts will stop yelling at you. That's great.
This is where we're at now. It appears that the
ragn of all caps maybe coming to a close as
Nedicut evolves. But I argue there's something greater at work here,
(27:47):
and I want to see what you think about this,
because we we see these backlashes against the language changing English,
the language we were speaking 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,
(28:09):
no matter um how the people at the O E.
D 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. And now what we're seeing, despite
the objection of the numerous so called grammar nazis, is
(28:31):
a move away from punctuation, and we're moving toward or
should I say back toward an idio grammatic sort of language.
With the rise of one of your favorite things, pal emoji,
I'm a fan. You know. Our coworker Tristan, another superproducer
(28:52):
in the house Stuff Works family Um is a big
fan of 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.
He likes to use. And what we're noting here about
the idea graphic use of emoji is that currently it
(29:14):
seems really controversial. As we're recording this, just a few
years back, pretty recent in the historical record, someone wrote
a novel entirely in emoji, which I have not read,
so I cannot comment on it. But there are a
lot of faces in it. Oh, there's an eggplant. That
might be the racy part here. There's a movie that's
written all in emoji like a script. It's the Emoji Movie. Okay,
(29:39):
it's really sad. Casey Pegram 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. So emoji are popular, and what
strange is that they're approaching a universality and ubiquity. Uh,
(30:03):
they're approaching something like a common tongue. You and I
don't have to speak Arabic in order to understand a
smiling face. It's true. But these, uh, these sets of
emoji graphics that come stock on a lot of phones
have their roots in in Japan, and so there are
a lot of of of emojis that have different meanings
(30:26):
you know, to the Japanese and they do to us.
And then there are the most more basic ones that
they're just like, you know, a smiling face or the
O face or what have you, that we can take
and understand more universally. But then they're you know, in
these sets that you go real deep and they're like
foods that maybe we're not super familiar with or just
just I can't think of a specific example right now,
(30:46):
can you? Yeah? Gestures? And I'm really glad you mentioned this,
because while it is easier to communicate across languages and emoji,
it's not instant fluency. It's very culturally dependent. So in
the Western world, or let's call it Abramaic religions from
Judeo Christian values, uh, the folded hands like this are
(31:08):
seen as representing prayer. Japanese emoji users will see it
as a salutation, and younger people from a secular background
think about this. I think it's a high five. Isn't
that interesting? Interesting? Or it could be just like kind
of a wonder Twins united kind of I use it
as thank you? Is that the common use in the
(31:30):
In America, 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
(31:52):
writers of a language, are helping to. We've collectively you're
important or part of this. If you want the sebo
colon to stay, then buy Gali. 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, Because I mean,
at the end of the day, communication is just about
(32:15):
the message, not the medium for the most part, right,
So whatever works, uh is pretty much fair game. Or
at least that's the way it's seen with um texting
and internet communication and all of this stuff that's led
to where we are today. So what what is your
preferred method for conveying emphasis in text? Let us know
(32:37):
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 send just text me okay, period
or something and I'm like, WHOA, what did I do?
You know? And it's so unreasonable. There's no you have
(32:57):
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 how stuff works dot com. You can also
hit us up on social media where we are Ridiculous
(33:19):
History on Facebook, Twitter, and also Instagram. 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 Whole sketch about the
guy who doesn't know that he sounds sarcastic. Bonus points,
(33:41):
friends and neighbors. If you can in your email show
us the form that you prefer. Don't 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, and one of
those top people is Jesselyn Shields, who wrote the article
(34:02):
shouty caps are a much older invention than you think
for how stuff works dot Com. So thanks to Jesselyn
for her contributions to this episode, and of course we
would also like to thank our super producer Casey Pegram
and Alex Williams who wrote our theme and most importantly
picture and asterix around this next word you Thanks for
(34:22):
listening so sparkly all of you, and be sure to
join us next time for another episode of Ridiculous History.
Ridiculous History News
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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