Capital Crimes
In which the Author rants about excessive Uppercasing
As a sixty-five-year-old geezer who’s spent the bulk of his adult life writing for paychecks, I figure I am perfectly within my rights to vent about what I consider one of the most persistent and annoying side effects of the Trump era: a breakdown in the norms of capitalization. I realize this problem is inconsequential when compared to all the other daily outrages our president and his minions are foisting on us, but still—it pisses me off to no end.
Here’s one of the old fart’s latest missives, posted on his proprietary social media outlet on Monday, just before midnight, when he should have been counting sheep.
“Military.”
“Nation.”
“Historic Recruiting Records.”
“Number One Priority.”
“Generations.”
And that’s not even counting the non-existent proper nouns (“Great Department of War”) and all-caps exclamations (“HOTTER!”) that pollute his prose. He’s been degrading our great English language—the language with the best words, no country’s ever had better words—at least since his first presidential run. It seems to be a calculated rules-don’t-apply-to-me tactic meant to fortify his connection with his rules-don’t-apply-to-us base. In a Twitter post back in 2018, he confirmed that it was all part of a brilliant plan:
After having written many best selling books, and somewhat priding myself on my ability to write, it should be noted that the Fake News constantly likes to pour over my tweets looking for a mistake. I capitalize certain words only for emphasis, not b/c they should be capitalized!
(Please ignore the incorrect use of the homophone, “pour.” Nothing to see here.)
It’s worth acknowledging that Trump’s erratic uppercasing is not unprecedented and, in fact, harks back at least to the country’s founding. Remember, the Declaration of Independence begins with a reference to “the Course of human events,” before moving on to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and a bunch of other quirky capitalizations. But the rules governing when and when not to capitalize evolved over time, and seemed to be pretty well established until Trump came along and blew them up. In the old days, we were supposed to capitalize the first words of sentences as well as proper nouns. That was it. Trump decided that grammatical guideposts like that were ripe for ignoring. And it wasn’t just him. Lexicographer Kory Stamper noticed a growing prevalence of over-uppercasing among conservatives during the first Trump administration. “There is definitely a heavy tie to wanting to mimic the founding fathers,” she said, “and they seem to have latched on to capitalization as the way to do it.”
In recent years, this Trump-induced, capitals-gone-wild trend has gained its own pointy-headed label: Contrastive Focus Capitalization (CFC). Linguist Josh Linden describes CFC as “a meaningful grammatical construction of written, Web-based English.” Actually, I think the proper adjective is “irritating,” not “meaningful.” CFC and its grammatical opposite—the all-lowercase writing style that’s become common in text messaging—provide additional evidence (as if we need it) that the concept of shared understanding and shared experience is increasingly illusory. I find the whole thing irritating.
I also find it sad.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!