# uppercase: i don't like uppercase letters

why are there two glyphs for each english letter? why are there bunch of random rules to decide which glyph to use in various situations? i honestly have no idea. i suspect this might have been their history:

• people chisel into stone tablets. only long straight strokes are practical so people use uppercase. only uppercase letters exist at this point.
• people start writing with hands. cursive scripts are much easier on the hand so people start rounding the letters. eventually these become the lowercase letters.
• to make books look fancy, the first letter on each page is a huge ass old style uppercase letter.
• everyone wants to look fancy, everyone makes the first letter old style uppercase letter.
• now every sentence starts with an uppercase.
• now every name starts with an uppercase.
• world implodes due to this insanity (not happened yet but soon will).

this is nonsense. there is zero difference how you pronounce uppercase letters versus lowercase letters therefore there should not be two separate cases. "oh but it helps me find the sentence's start". boohoo. you will get used to it. that is why punctuation exists. if uppercase letters would not exist and somebody would want to invent it, people would laugh them off. say i invent a middle case with completely different glyphs for each letter and the rule is to use middle case at the end of sentences or names. does that sound ridiculous? well, uppercase sounds just as ridiculous to me. most non-western languages do not have this idiocracy.

why keep lowercase instead of uppercase? because lowercase is much easier on eyes. it has larger variety in height. you see a word like "apple" and you can see two spikes down before the middle and one spike up after the middle. chances are you can still better guess the word after applying extreme blur levels compared to its uppercase version where all letters have the same size.

and just imagine how significantly easier writing would become. no more effort wasted about thinking or discussing the capitalization of titles, names, lists and so on. less effort typing the uppercase letters. less computer logic to compare words. if you want to make the world a better place then stop using uppercase letters. please spread the word to make this revolution reach a critical mass.

# edit 2021-06: i've posted this to r/changemyview to challenge this idea.

here's the thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/oaqzcz/cmv_writing_doesnt_inherently_need_uppercase

i have to add that by this time i was already a bit softened with regards to uppercase letters. i started programming in go. it gives uppercase letters a meaningful function: it means a symbol is exported. since i like go in general, i got used to it and embraced this meaning.

however capitalization of sentence beginnings and names still didn't make sense to me. that's what most people argued for as the reason for these letters but i didn't really find them convincing. while i acknowledge they provide some minor benefits in terms of speed and clarity, i still find the effect not big enough to warrant them. it's just much simpler for me to write like this in my hidden little corner of the internet.

but in general i see some value in having separate letter case when it's used for emphasis just like how you would use bold and italics. but that's pretty much it.

if i wanted to dig deeper into the arguments, i'd need to split the issue into three key points:

• the existence of uppercase letters (i sort of accepted this at this point),
• capitalization of sentence beginnings,
• capitalization of names.

the function of the last two is different. arguing about all of them in a single thread is just too exhausting.

the most reasonable answers told me that it's fine in informal writing. for formal writing it's just as it is but that's not necessarily set in stone. if all lowercase gets common enough, maybe that could get formalized. this means i should totally continue doing this if i want to get all lowercaps more accepted in formal writing.

published on 2017-12-04, last modified on 2021-07-12

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