The primary contention with “monkey see, monkey do”
By ABHINAYA KASAGANI— akasagani@ucdavis.edu
I turned off my auto-capitalization sometime in 2020 and haven’t looked back since. Little did I know that what I had assumed was a temporary change would stick. I never questioned why I had been asked to do this — until now, I suppose — or what the end of auto-capitalization meant, optically. Five years have passed, and still we SHOUT IN ALL CAPS, feign indifference in all lowercase and alternate between the two to communicate sArCasM.
This grammatical shift has been attributed to several different things: some admit to having adopted this lettering to seem nonchalant; others attribute this to Tumblr in the 2010s, while others claim that the origins of such lowercase lettering can be traced back to the feminist writer Bell Hooks, or even the poet, E. E. Cummings. Hooks once said that her intention behind the lowercase format of her name, “bell hooks,” was to keep the focus on “the substance of books, not who I am.”
This stylistic choice was later co-opted by online poets, most notably Rupi Kaur, as a way of “breaking the rules.” By 2020, the Internet had popularized the use of solely lowercase letters, with several mainstream pop artists — Charli XCX, Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande — immortalizing their discographies in all-lowercase: “brat” summer, “evermore” fall and “eternal sunshine” spring. Soon after this, tech companies — namely Facebook, X and Tumblr — embraced the use of all-lowercase lettering for corporate branding.
The move away from auto-caps became more than a stylistic choice; It marked a cultural shift wherein digital minimalism and casual or informal conversation were prioritized. Lowercase lettering was a way for one to assert their individuality more quietly. Formality began to feel stuffy and ingenuine in comparison to the approachable, laid-back lowercase.
Linguist Gretchen McCulloch, in her book “Because Internet,” explores these rampant Internet phenomena that have long dictated our dialects of Internet communication. She discusses how “emphatic caps feel like the quintessential example of internet tone of voice,” describing this lettering as a “typographic way of conveying the same set of cues [that one would use in speech].”
There remains no definitive way to claim that lowercase writing while texting is incorrect, or that it reliably conveys some sort of emotional nuance that is otherwise lost on the texter, just as one cannot fully grasp how lowercase text asserts digital autonomy purely by controlling the visual aesthetics of a word.
Naomi Susan Baron, a professor emeritus of linguistics at American University, likens typing in lowercase to “the ripped jeans fad of the ’90s that cyclically comes back into style every decade.” What is more concerning, however, is this desire to perform, even within the private space of a chatroom to which only chosen members are privy. Some might not even be thinking about it that deeply. They might’ve simply followed along to ensure that they wouldn’t lose their front-row seat to generational ostracization.
This collective adoption of all lowercase letters is somewhat frightening if assessed as more than a frivolous stylistic choice. The prescriptivist critique of this form of texting argues that it abandons conventional grammar rules, potentially breaking down clarity or littering academic and professional spaces with informality. Occasionally forgetting that Internet language, like all other languages, evolves with its users, this critique fails to recognize that none of these rules are governing, nor were they ever meant to be standardized for the “capital T” Texter.
This collective embrace of the all-lowercase feels as if it were a marker of social and cultural change. Capital letters once denoted the start of a sentence, a proper noun or the urgency of a cry or shout. The letter “I” was perpetually capitalized in a way that individualism was originally prioritized. Lately, however, it has felt as if this generation’s individuality has subsumed into a collective, making this deliberate staging of personality for the sake of communicating a certain aloofness ironic and somewhat oddly sincere.
Written by: Abhinaya Kasagani— akasagani@ucdavis.edu
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