I recently read a story. It is an autobiographical account(sidenote:1Or at least, styled as such. It could very well be fictionally autobiographical, but mumble mumble this is the style and genre nonetheless somehow. Either way, this doesn’t affect the ideas in this post.) titled “after my dad died, we found the love letters,” and I was very touched. Be forewarned: despite the possible directions that can be taken from such a title, I’d say it feels strictly more melancholy then even “bittersweet.” I’m touchy at the idea of discussing the article directly, as if these real human people are just specimens under a microscope—possibly interesting or fun under many circumstances, but distasteful to me on account of the heavy weight of death.
But I had my interest piqued(sidenote:2No, not peaked. I should keep a list of common misspellings on here for fun.) by something else going on. I found the story from a post on the link aggregator Hacker News,(sidenote:3HN is a pretty cool concept. Also, there are a few posts around on how it maintains reasonably high discussion quality compared to, say, the mean over all reddit posts.) and something was discussed a non-negligible amount: the lack of uppercasing to start sentences. There were plenty of thoughts on both sides, but I wanted to record a few of mine.
Poetry is an interesting medium. It’s hard to even define it precisely—my own conception is something like “kinda anything that mainly tries to make someone feel something.” There are many warning bells and raised eyebrows in my mind already at that attempt to drag definition from subconcious to language, but I’ll leave it at that.
Also, I probably wouldn’t even characterize the story as poetry, not exactly. Its main purpose is more to tell the story, and most stories try to be told well—feelings just happen, or are targeted, to achieve that.(sidenote:4Wow, these last two or three paragraphs don’t flow well.)
But still, all this context leads to the main idea for this blog post: is lowercasing okay? Why would we want to do it?
I offer a case study: me. I felt the lowercasing was fine or possibly added to the experience. As a result of the unique experiences I’ve had, the lowercasing felt like being in a warm blanket, of mumbling, of not putting the effort into being heard. Sometimes this is the association of being among friends, of assured trust: I don’t have anything to prove to these people, we know we enjoy each other’s company all the same.
Even though the circumstances are different, the unconscious connotative feeling the style choice was a pretty cool experience.
This leads to a sad thought I have every once in a while. Many such stylistic decisions made to invoke feelings from connotation are incredibly past-experience-dependent. I think it’s human to want to be heard, but it’s melancholy that you can shout from the rooftops, but people who aren’t the desired audience won’t get the exact experience you spent time crafting. I have a poem around here somewhere about that…