There’s a clever joke making the rounds at e2. There are variations, but it goes something like this:
The gag is usually delivered as a softlink appended to the offending write-up. My favourite is the classic, “there’s a spider in my keyboard.” But the list is surprisingly long. In addition to that old standby, “e.e. cummings”, you can find the courteous-yet-direct, “Capitalize, please”, and the ironic, “capital letters” (written in lowercase).
If the author eschews other aspects of standard English, he (or more likely ‘she’--as such galling informality is an affectation apparently adopted most commonly by teenage girls) may be directed to a primer on punctuation, charged with being illegible, or, hilariously, reminded that job applications with spelling errors will be thrown away.
Sentiment runs so strongly that one can find partisans on both sides of a debate about People who don't capitalize their I's. It even appears that rampant decapitalization might have national security implications. Now, I can understand a certain level of opposition to a practice that gives a demonstrable military edge to the Soviets. After all, the Chinese don’t capitalize and look how quickly they succumbed to communism. But I’m not suggesting that NATO Command should emulate James Joyce in styling its Directives. Let the military emphasize clarity, I say. War is no time to allow oneself to be distracted by the guilty pleasures of hermeneutical exegesis. I even say we require Engineers to capitalize—at least in the name of Safety and Efficiency—though it is my understanding that spelling is generally the greater hurdle in their case.
But when I hear the claim that sentences should be capitalized so the reader may more quickly and effortlessly scan the text and move on, I must object. I don’t necessarily want my reader to race through the piece. In fact, when I choose to work in lowercase (and I do so judiciously), it is usually because I don’t even want the reader to be confident of where one thought ends and another begins. I want him to linger over the ambiguity. I want her to struggle with it, to get lost in it before finding a way out. This will no doubt strike the more conservative readers as utterly bizarre and the militant ones as almost treasonous. After all, what is language for if not to communicate?
But such a question misses the point. Standard English can be profoundly normative. It has a tendency to facilitate the most quotidian presuppositions. Again, I have nothing against standard English. I use it daily. I am using it now. I recognize the sense of the various arguments in favour of linguistic standards. But even the greatest achievements--the best practices—require trade-offs. And while what is sacrificed in the trade-off may be inessential (in whatever context), to dismiss it as intrinsically unimportant or uninteresting is simply rash.
There is much that cannot be communicated by standard English, whatever one’s virtuosity with the language. The recognition of this fact is what motivated Joyce to develop his own notorious style—a style that embodies all the things linguistic conservatives abhor. It wasn’t done capriciously. It was a response to a perceived inadequacy in the language. Those who find it difficult are in the majority. But those who find the required effort prohibitive were never the intended audience anyway. Criticism is the most valuable commodity on offer at e2. But cleverly pointing out that an author’s piece fails to conform to standard punctuation is a tedious joke at best. If the piece is worthy of mockery, surely something more substantive should be cited.