Yes, good point. I associate it with a certain loyal, unquestioning attitude toward institutions and authority.
The Thing I Hate Is People Who Take The Time And Effort To Write Every Single Word Like They’re Writing The Headline To A Story. I First Ran Into It In An Internet Chatroom. The Girl Who Did It Told Me She Thought It Made Her Sentences Look More Interesting And Important. That Says It All, Really.
I Will Occasionaly Do this when I start typing a sentance. But I never capitalize random words in the middle of a sentance.
This is becoming oddly pervasive. I saw a road sign this spring that said:
Caution. Roads are “slick.”
That’s what drivers need, sarcasm from the highway department. :rolleyes:
If you want to see this in practice, go to eBay. Well, don’t go there if you care about the language, because it’ll make you horribly depressed. But I see it on there all the time. The other day, I had to show my wife a sentence with 53 words before a punctuation mark, and it was the wrong one. In that huge, run-on sentence, words were capitalized at random. Not even words that could be considered selling points. The writing style sounded like Grade 3 Remedial English class - it was something like: “This are a Nice pear of shoes they Are fuschia With sequinces it is patton Leather the souls arent Wore down the heal is 2 Inchs thanks For looking check out my Other items,” - although it was less literate than my example.
So part of it is a complete failure to grasp writing. I imagine another part of it is little exposure to writing. You’d think that one might absorb it by osmosis, right? Nope. Some folks start out without a clue, and never gain one.
A lot of my students do this, just Randomly capitalize Words for no good Reason. When I ask them why they do this, they invariably shrug. It’s a mystery for the ages, and one that annoys the crap outta me.
I vote for a combination of 1) rank ignorance and 2) not even giving a shit.
Random quotes make me laugh. We had a local grocery store, back in the boonies where I’m originally from, that had this beauty written on all of their plastic grocery bags:
[Name of store]
**Where we “care” about our “customers”. **
Later, they changed it:
Where “quality” means “everything”.
And one more time:
Our “products” are “fresh”.
Good lord. I couldn’t bring myself to shop there. :dubious:
I saw a picture of a baker holding a sign in the newspaper. It was something about a power outage wreaking havoc across the city or something like that. But anyway, he was holding a cardboard sign. And the sign said:
““NO”” BREAD TODAY
And I was like, :dubious:? “No” bread? Does that mean there actually is bread? Or do the quotation marks cancel each other out and there actually is no bread?
See above. I always capitalize the letters in the main words of my titles. I, of course, don’t capitalize the little words like “a”, “an” “in” “the” (unless it’s the first word). There are bunches of other little words I wouldn’t capitalize in a title, I’m sure.
I never Randomly capitalize In normal Day-To-Day correspondence.
It annoys me, too. But ironically, there is one item in my house that I always do this with: The Big Green Bed.
I have a HUGE green dog bed that all my dogs would fit comfortabley on (That is , y’know, if the Papillons didn’t think the Gordons have cooties…) and for some reason, I don’t think of it as the big green bed. It’s always The Big Green Bed.
I don’t know why.
Yes, I am weird.
I’m sure you know this, but nonstandard capitalization is probably a lot rarer than it seems, because your attention is only called to capitalization when you notice something is wrong. Standard capitalization doesn’t get noticed.
Also, I’m up for a challenge. If someone can give me a large enough genuine sample of text from an author who uses seemingly random capitalization, I bet I can find some pattern to it. Probably nothing categorical, but at least probabilistic, i.e. significantly different from a text in which a truly random selection of words had their initial letters capitalized. Anyone?
I’ve noticed folks from the UK doing this. Picture the Winnie-the-Pooh books, for example. Pooh might go on a Really Long Journey. I’ve noted Brits on the web using caps like that. It’s not for emphasis, exactly. More like yo’d almost expect to see a tm after the phrase, if you catch my meaning.